Ghost in the Shell: Ascendance
by nickbana1989
Summary: A new age of infocrime has swept the galaxy, and it is threatening the Council's thousand year old stability. Section 9 is at the forefront, solving the cybercrimes whilst a new threat emerges from the horizon...
1. Leakage Pt 1

A/N: Another crossover from me, now with collaboration with Sevoris from SB. Many thanks for all beta readers. Please enjoy and comment.

Oh, and OVERSHOT was underway. Don't worry.

[SAIN\\\MIN\\\IV/OUN\\\s9\\\newsfeeds\op_compile\\\ ]

"...massive incident of what experts are calling the "Infocrime coup of the century" as human hacking AIs were used to subvert banking systems citadel space-wide in a massive attack that must have been prepared for months…"

"...Advances in salarian augmentations, with Ovetes Enterprises announcing a new series of Salarian-issue "Cyberbrains" for the Consumer market later this year, promising a new series of advanced Eidetic Exocortex Memory Augmentations as the forefront of the new system…"

"...The question of how exactly the Citadel will deal with the increasing leakage of advanced and dangerous human technology into the galactic markets remains unclear. The Citadel Council recently assured a new solution is being worked on, but declined to name details…"

"...It is obvious we are looking at a new age of infocrime. And it is threatening _everyone_. "

[\\\ ]

* * *

The man took the call at the proverbial center of human space. His office's view gazed out onto the canyon of reflective glass, greenery growing down its sides from the round infinity of the sky beyond, the horizon curving up and about to be swallowed by the sky. Stanford 1 was a microcosm of the modern city: glass buildings, vertical gardens, greenery walls, skyscrapers and bright pastel walls under a holographic sky, squeezed into a 10-kilometer tube.

All this was perfectly replicated on a molded holographic screen that filled the offices round wall and part of the ceiling; the actual room was buried 50 meters inside a building complex that wrapped around one of the Torus structural beams through the center of the pressure body.

Aramaki liked the openness of the room for what it was worth; though he had grown up in the crampiness of Japan's earthen Megacities and seen his share of starship headquarters and tight space stations during his lifetime and career, the years in the colonies had kindled a fondness for open spaces, even if it was only a facsimile.

At the moment, though, his attention was not occupied with the world of glass, silver and green beyond the confines of his office, but the man whose head, upper torso and shoulders hovered in front of Aramaki's desk, projected there by the trigraphics system embedded into the table decorations, various pieces of the ceiling, and sunk into the walls.

"So what can I do for the System Alliance Military Intelligence Agencies Internal Security today?", Aramaki asked, friendly but wary under his apparently open face. Kubota did not call like this if the case wasn't urgent… and dirty.

"The short version?", Kubota asked. "We have an urgent leak that needs stopping and got about 24 hours before we lose more than water."

Aramaki fought a snort. "And you come with me with this because…?"

"Because the leak is a high-ranking official within the Office of Military Intelligence Systems and we can't shut down the leak legally… he's involved with foreign officials with diplomatic immunity."

"And you want Section 9 to go in and sanitize?"

"Yes. I know you can scramble one of your mission teams for a Black Ops on Earth within the hour. I'm sending you all our files and encrypted uplinks with One-time pads to you can keep your eyes and fingers within the system, but we have to stop this leak for good - And if I do this, I'll have to do it openly with Section 6 and we have both burned fingers and a big scandal on our hands."

"Allright. Where?"

"Transfer will be in a hotel complex at Singapore Groundport the next day in the evening. I take it you can handle this?"

"I can. I'll call you back."

"Thanks. I owe you one." Kubota looked openly relieved, his professional mask cracking. Aramaki took note. People like Kubota didn't lose their integrity openly like that for nothing.

"That you do. Have a nice evening." Aramaki closed the connection and watched the checklist running in the open as the quantum-encrypted end-to-end connection closed and disconnected. Kubota had pulled all the stops on this one - Quantum-encrypted transmission lines, a dedicated one-time pad, and a scrambled multi-packet connection that looped through various parts of the Extranet and the System Alliance Communication network between him and Aramaki's personal server at Section 9. The connection was anonymous, heavily encrypted, not stored, and ultimately deniable. Just as they both wanted. Aramaki valued sources like Kubota, men and women within the massive apparatus that was the System Alliance, feeding him critical info and political munition alike in return for favors like these. It made Aramaki job of keeping the Infosecurity of human and now also citadel space from the manifold forms of infocrime much easier at times, and gave Section 9 the working space it needed.

And now Aramaki was about to use that working space once again. He called up the trigraphic interface of his desk with a hand gesture, and directed it to the internal com system of Section 9. The quick-call section held the name he wanted in the first slot. He tapped it, and waited for the connection to establish itself. It opened with an affirmative digital tone: "Sir?" "Major, come to my office and ready your Mission Team for deployment. We have an urgent CASE BLACKLIGHT DELTA that needs fixing." "On my way Sir."

 **= Prologue - "Leakage" =**

 **-| March 21st, 2232 |-**

Public Security Section 9 was, on first glance, just another organization within the massive apparatus that was the System Alliance Government. The group occupied a single square inside of the Home Ministry organization chart, mostly standing out because it wasn't, unlike other Sections, subordinate to the Bureau of Home Security Operations, but stood in a little separate group with a few other Sections. Those in the know knew that even this was more an administrative formality - Section 9 was really only subordinate to the System Alliance Government itself, and that its leader Aramaki only spoke with one person very often - The Prime Minister of the System Alliance. Besides that, pretty much nothing was known about Section 9, outside of a small section on the sleek and polished System Alliance Home Ministry Information Page clarifying that Public Security Section 9 "deals with cyberterrorism and capital infocrime cases."

Togusa knew better now. He had heard of the secret innards of the System Alliance Intelligence community before - And had dealt with his share of ONI and MIS agents while working with Starpol, at times even received information from them. But Togusa had never shown much interest in the dark side of the System Alliance - His dedication was to catching those who broke the law, without breaking it himself. And as helpful and enticing it had seemed at times, he had never broken the law, gone through cases upright and with his morals intact - And built a reputation as a very good detective and morally uptight man. But it had also made enemies with those parts of Starpol that were less so, and Togusa found himself slowly but steadily being sidelined, having made made an enemy in high enough places somewhere along the way.

And then, one day, an old man - Japanese from the looks of it - had sat in Togusa's office at Starpol's Arcturus Headquarters, and made him an offer. He introduced himself as Daisuke Aramaki, Chief of Public Security Section 9. His second-in-command had requested Togusa for her team. When Togusa had asked why, Aramaki had answered with one word, her words not his, he had stressed: "Diversity."

The group assembling in High Security Meeting Room 03 was certainly diverse, Togusa reflected as he entered the room, a coffee mug in hand.

"Look who's coming," greeted Batou.

"Afternoon, big guy,"Togusa replied with a grin.

Batou grinned back. A former Alliance Army Rangers, his very notable feature was a pair of Leupold M15A3 Integrated Visual Systems, making him capable of seeing in multiple spectrums of light. It also gave him the appearance of wearing a pair of goggles in place of normal eyeballs, earning him the nickname 'Sleepless Eyes' by his colleagues back in his Army days. A jack-of-all trades, he was capable of doing all tasks given by Chief Aramaki, although he was not as capable as other specialist, except for one thing: Endurance. No one in the Section was as capable of stakeout and reconnaissance as Batou in his bad day. And he could do it in weeks. A big and burly man, his Fuji Heavy Industries Type 10 Skeletal Systems Shell was currently wearing his beloved bomber jacket, jeans and a pair of suede boot to match.

With a nod to his right, Togusa took his seat between Ishikawa and Batou. At 60 years of age (not that it was showing), Ishikawa was the second oldest member of the Section, after Aramaki. A veteran of First Contact War, he was involved in the Retaking of Shanxi. He also was one of the first Cyberwarfare specialists that were exposed to Turian network architecture. Today he looked tired with his beard unkempt and his brown cardigan ruffled.

"Pulling an all-nighter again?" queried Togusa.

"Yeah, the attack vectors of the Defense Ministry Data Retrieval Hack from a week ago are still largely unidentified. The punks who designed the mainframe architecture ought to be lined up and shot. Their software was a fucking joke. Buggy Defense APIs all around and no AGI support to patch it. Only TWO barriers between the Net access and the NetDefSec servers, no single hardware interlock. The attackers could wipe the Black Box data simple, and left us with nothing to track and fix the exploit. Fucking cheapest developer shit."

"That serious." Togusa silently hoped Ishikawa wouldn't launch into one of his exhaustion-fueled, hour-long rants.

"Yeah". Ishikawa immersed himself in his laptop again, burning a hole into the OLED screen with his two tired, bloodshot eyes, grabbing an open Alliance OptiBoost energy drink from the table.

 _Well, today's his cranky day_ , Togusa thought, and leaned back in his chair, nursing the cup of coffee.

With the hiss of the security doors, another group arrived and took their seat at the briefing room. After exchanging greetings, Saito, Borma and Paz took their seat in front of them on the other side of the conference table.

Saito was a former Blue Suns mercenary hired by Aramaki under… unusual circumstances. His close-cropped hair revealed a scar that ran parallel to his hairline and his Hawkeye Sniper Assist System gave the appearance of him wearing an eyepatch on his left eye. The device, the implanted optical package of a full ballistic fire control system, connected directly to satellites deployed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, or other Spotter assets, to give him an optimal firing solution when snipping. As a veteran Blue Suns, he sported a Suns tattoo at his chest, exposed by his shirt.

Borma, another "big guy" in the team, sported similar augmentation as Batou, as it was standard with the Alliance Army 455th Rangers. His augmentation came with a different version however, flatter and bulkier, hardened against shock. Borma's version were specialized versions of an SA-standard EOD kit - The full-body augmentation wouldn't tank a mass driver cannon round, but he could survive a hefty amounts of bullets and shrapnel, even for a full-body Cyborg. As standard in Alliance EOD training, he too was trained as a hacking expert, and thus was assigned to assist Ishikawa whenever he could.

Paz had, like Saito, a unique history. Before joining Section 9, Paz served with the Alliance Army Military Police - Despite being a member of Sicilian Mafia. Aramaki had used that fact to hire Paz into Section 9. Having a connection with the underworld in general, and La Cosa Nostra in particular, Paz had proven valuable when the investigation involved or required the shady elements of society to solve - A depressingly common occurrence. Paz' background also taught him... numerous "advanced" interrogation techniques and hand-to-hand fighting. You could bring anyone into a same room with him, and he'd make the target sing a perfect choir song with his Bowie knife. Even Krogan. Togusa suppressed a shudder. He had only seen Helmet camera recordings of the incident, but he did not want to know where Paz had acquired the skills required to break Krogan though the application of pain. From his time at StarPol Togusa had met more than one krogan, and found them very hard to break - And utterly resilient to anything that wasn't an Anti-Cyborg weapon.

"What's the scuttlebutt about your daughter again?"

"Huh?" Togusa turned his head towards Batou. "Oh, yeah, Kat. Nothing to worry about, just her application to high school."

"Why is that?"

Ishikawa chimed in, still staring at his screen: "Because the school apparently tried to classify the kids based on their parents wealth. Turns out they discriminate on wealth and position. I didn't know that practice even done by a Citadel-based school, nevermind an Asari one at that."

"Well, as other peoples said, the more things change, the more they stay the same." Batou concluded.

"Oh, it's not just that. Those yokels apparently tried to access Togusa's classified records." Batou's head flipped around, his expression saying Are you kidding me? Ishikawa nodded, looking up from his screen for a moment. "Yes, they actually tried. They only got the 'official' version though. Our boy here", Ishikawa reached over and padded Togusa well-meaning on the back, "is just your run-of-the-mil inter-organization liaison officer with a good government paycheck." He winked with one eye.

Borma became interested to the conversation: "So what's the school your daughter apply again?"

"Askatis Academy," Togusa sighed. "If not because that school was the best near my wife's workplace, I'm damn well wouldn't do it. It's just too big a hassle."

After Togusa's wife Saori got her job as a researcher in an Alliance's lab in Tayseri Ward on the Citadel, their children were staying with her there. Togusa's hectic lifestyle just make it almost impossible for him to take care of his teenaged son and daughter. Only during the weekend or his off day that Togusa went home with the family, taking one of the private transport shuttles the Alliance provided between Arcturus and the Citadel.

"Well, perks for being a father I guess." Batou smirked and patted Togusa's shoulder. Togusa sighed again.

"Speaks for yourself, Batou," Paz lighted his cigarette, his hint of a smile lit by the fire of the Zippo: "Who's gonna take care of Gabriel this time again?"

"OH COME ON!" The rest of the group laughed.

Batou's own Basset Hound was always the point of contention in the group. One of the rarest cloned dog breeds, Gabriel required exorbitant amounts of care, moreso because more than once in awhile Batou and the rest of the team were off Arcturus for a week or more on Field Operations. However the group agreed it was better that Batou at least used his money on something worthwhile rather than blowing his paycheck on totally useless things like his weight training equipment - Batou's prosthetics experienced neither atrophy nor build-up, and thus did not care about being exercised like biological muscle; if anything his insistence on using the weights only resulted in increased maintenance on the mil-spec limbs. Batou's response when someone brought this fact up was a grumble of indignation. He liked the feeling of his muscles working, even if it was only the Body Image Feedback interface of his Shell and not actual flesh and bone doing work instead of the strands of synthetic muscle fiber over alloy bones.

"Maybe we should ask the Old Ape if we can get a Mobile Dog Unit with us on OP", Borma suggested, his voice heavy with mirth, cracking the obligatory joke. "No Biomorphs permitted in the Cargo Section, you forget that?", Paz crackled, then switched his voice, trying to immediate Aramaki: "And we will not be retrofitting every of our Spacecraft with a Dog enclosure." Everyone suppressed a grin, Saito rolling his good eye and Batou crossing his arms before cracking a half-smile.

"So, anyway…" Togusa was thrown out of the smalltalk when an AR Token popped up in his vision. The Briefing Room had posted a standard Information Package into the local Mesh, informing someone was authenticating themselves at the Security Console outside. The wooden door began opening with a Clonk! of unlocking bolts, revealing the armored bulkhead hidden underneath.

Major Kusanagi stepped through first, a small portable Data crystal in one hand; Aramaki entered behind her. Togusa noted the serious expression on both faces; Aramaki, Togusa thought with some shock, looked even more grim and serious than he usually did.. Major Kusanagi had her usual game face on; a face bordering on that of a low-quality Android. Togusa had noted this quirk about the female full-body Cyborg early on - Her body language was very controlled, especially when she was being serious, and the Major lacked many of the "living" quirks human faces had. He had no idea what caused that quirk;- the Major's body was far too well-constructed to explain away the lack of facial motor control. Nobody build bleeding-edge androidal shells for Special Forces and then skimped out on the facial capabilities.

Kusanagi walked straight to the front of the conference table and hit two keys on the trigraphic interface there; the tessellated OLED panels in the ceiling dimmed down to plunge the room into darkness, and around them the walls seemed to recede into black infinity. With an off-hand motion the data crystal was slotted into a recess, where it was drawn in and covered by a thin hatch. The wrap-around Holographic Wall Screen and the trigraphic space over the conference table came alive with a voluminous dot grid as the briefing package loaded.

[ 1835 Hours 40 Seconds Arcturus Time | March 21st 2232 ]

[ Section 9 Mission Team Alpha-01 | High Security Conference/Briefing Room 03 ]

[ Operations Briefing OPERATION BLIND LILLY - Major Motoko Kusanagi briefing ]

[ SECURING CONFERENCE ROOM ]

Togusa's network connection cut out abruptly as the briefing room shut down its outside connections and activated its jammers. Besides him, Ishikawa jolted in his chair, apparently so immersed in his work that the cut-off had caught him by surprise; he made a strangled sound under his beard. _Really cranky today if he forgets to save and log out_.

[CONFERENCE ROOM SECURE. BRIEFING MAY COMMENCE. ]

Motoko Kusanagi looked throughout the room, making eye contact with everyone and ensuring she had their attention, then spoke:

"Alright people, listen up! We've been made aware of a potential leak from Military Intelligence about fifteen minutes ago. A high ranking official with the Defense Ministries Office of Military Intelligence Systems will be handing over classified AI Software code and System Logs to a Citadel official in about twenty-four hours from now."

"Shit, AI code?" remarked Batou. "Damn, that OMIS brass sure has balls to hand that over so easily. Gotta be greased with a big payout."

"Or got honey trapped really well", Paz contributed.

She went on without commenting. "The transfer will occur at a hotel megaplex at Singapore Groundport, Penthouse level. This is the target." Several images of a Hispanic man in his visual fifties appeared on the briefing room screen - one an official file portrait, the other a high-resolution camera image shot in a richly decorated hallway, talking with two other people as they walked towards the Camera. His bio and general appearance framed the images.

"Juan Carlo Martinez, Commodore, Alliance Navy. Served with ONI before transferring to OMIS Luna HQ. It should be obvious why he's hot. He's in contact with this man." Martinez file zoomed to the side, making space for a second file: This time it was a salarian, in his visual mid-20s, with green-blue skin. The image was a high-resolution security image shot in the lobby of a building, the violet skies of the Serpent Nebula visible beyond the windows. "Hendal Wim. Citadel Alliance Representative at the Citadel Economic Development Foundation in Malaysia. Believed to have ties with the STG. He and Martinez are assumed to have been acquainted during Martinez' stint as a 'Legal Officer' at the Alliance Embassy on the Citadel."

"Sanitize?" Saito asked, eyeing the images, his remaining eye flickering over the details, taking in identifying cues.

"Yes. We'll be using Emergency Mobilization Loadout 2, departing within the hour aboard In Shadow Waiting for the Singapore Geo-Highport, undercover. No official trace."

"Err; we're neutralizing both, Major?" Batou asked, grinning.

"With the material as well", she confirmed. "We have to ensure nothing gets out of that meeting intact enough for a useful recovery. Collateral damage is secondary."

The Major returned from the wall of the conference room and approached the conference table. With a haptic motion she grabbed a trigraphic blue cube off the Readers trigraphic interface, and "threw" it into the center of the Conference room. The cube stopped in the center of the table, sinking down onto the surface and unfolding its sites, blossoming into digital lines in a small digital render effect.

The transparent holographic rendering of a cityscape blossomed on the table, gaining in fidelity and details with every second. At the center of the table rested a large, fat skyscraper, one solid fife-sided lower segment branching into two upper towers, with two surfaces angling towards the center at the base of the upper two towers. A set of "panels" was pierced through by the two top towers like by two pincers, apparently Air car garages among other things. At its base it melded into a larger superstructure from which three other similar towers of varying geometry also stabbed towards the sky.

"The Hilton Singapore Groundport Megaplex Tower 4 - the site of the meeting. Specifically, the west side penthouse facing." On her cue, the volumetric render closed in on the western angled face of the tower, orange holographic lines imposing themselves over the photorealistic render of the facade, highlighting floors and suites. One particular set of rooms at the base of the angled face was highlighted, orange lines and surfaces sketching out an impressive hotel suite with a large meeting room on the lower floor behind the glass facades.

"Penthouse Suite 0632. Two stories, living and meeting room on the lower floor where we presume the meeting will take place. Major Security features: bulletproof glass class IV-A, reinforced doors, building safety kinetic barriers, up-to-date building security systems. No obvious security solutions otherwise - all very likely to evade the attention of the AIA."

"Those aircar terraces above look perfect as an abseiling assault point", Batou remarked, pointing with one finger.

A smile played around The Major's lip for a moment: "It is. There's a maintenance level below the first garage, two stories of support and outside catwalks."

"Sniper positions?", Saito asked. "I know you'll want to get in close and personal to ensure their brains are ventilated and the stacks crushed, but overwatch is pretty much a necessity for his guards", he thumbed halfway over his shoulder to the portrait of Hendal Wim. He turned towards the table and spoke up: "Zoom out and show good overwatch sniper Positions for Suite 0632." The trigraphic did as desired, zooming the surrounding skyscrapers and the Skyways into view, and highlighting four positions on the faces of two nearby skyscrapers. "Fork off all four positions as trigraphs for detailed review.", he commanded. The system did as requested.

"In the meantime", the Major continued, "Ishikawa and Borma, I want you two working on infosec and a good dataflague. No traces in any local networks. We're going in total black, and we're going out total black."

She turned to Batou and Togusa. "You two will be on vehicle and Overwatch duty together with Ishikawa. Vehicles will be supplied by our Southeast Asian Division, so only pack our custom stuff and the associated racks. Also, get working on alternative EVAC plans. I'd expect everything to go smooth but we cannot be traced by anyone or pursued by anyone. Got it?"

"Got it., the three responded and got to work on their own corner of the table.

"Borma, I want you to work out how we get a nanobaric warhead into that suite. I don't want anything recoverable in there to survive the OP."

"Got it, Major. Only problem is, any form of deniable explosive we've got won't go through the windows - armor-piercing and burnable composite don't exactly go together."

"Any ammo that can't be traced to us?"

"Only if you're willing to go with normal Thermobaric instead of NTB."

"No", she shook her head. "ScatterBug to open the window for the NTB?"

Borma nodded thoughtfully, calling up the specifications of the hotel windows. "That should do it."

"Good. Then let's use that." She turned to the room at large. "Any red flags at this point? Final planning can be done on the flight to Earth and in the safehouse we'll have there." Everybody shock their heads as her eyes flicked from one to the next. "Good. Then let's get moving, load L2 and what we discussed, and plan in for alternatives so we aren't caught flat-footed. That concludes this briefing", Kusanagi touched the trigraphic controls and extracted the Data crystal. The trigraphic and the wall screen graphics collapsed, and the lights dimmed back up. "The In Shadow Waiting is already warming up for departure. We pack up and leave in an hour." With that, she left the room.

"A final word, If I may." Aramaki final stepped forward from his position by the door. "I know this mission seems very hasty and, to the newer of our members, also questionable. Let me assure you that this mission was a request of a close friend of mine whom I trust, and that this mission will not have repercussions for us. Especially if you all do your jobs. Now, good luck and godspeed to you all."

With that, Aramaki left the briefing room as well. Togusa threw a glance at Batou behind him - The reply was a grin: "Don't worry. The Chief knows what he's doing. And this isn't our first shadow rodeo either."

"Thanks for the assurance." I guess, Togusa added silently.

* * *

SAAF Office of Public Affairs

The Organisations of the System Alliance Military

Office of Military Intelligence Systems

The Office of Military Intelligence Systems is part of the Bureau of Military Systems and Technologies, and supervises all the AI and VI used by the System Alliance Armed Forces - From the LAIs installed in modern armor components over our AGI-driven robotic forces to the Artificial Super Intelligences that handle the SAAFs strategy, forecasting, and logistics - The AI systems and codelines, their procurement, inspection and servicing are all handled by the OMIS.

If you are interested in more details about the OMIS structure, its responsibilities, its code of ethics and handling of sentient AIs, or are interested in details about our AI systems, the OMIS public information page provides this and much more information for you.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **AGI:** Artificial General Intelligence, sapient AI with transhuman interlect, and full heuristic purview, able to perform any transhuman neurological and heuristical task.  
 **  
ASI:** Artificial Superintelligence. A (sapient) AI with greater-than-transhuman interlect and heuristical capability.  
 **  
Groundport:** In the transorbital/interface logistics chain, the Groundport is the terrestrial counterpart to the orbital Highport - Handling interface shipping by transatmospheric vehicle, mass driver, or space elevator. In the case of the Singapor Groundport, the base anchor of an equatorial "Skyline" space elevator complex.

 **LAI:** Limited Artificial Intelligence, Sub-AGI limited-purview AIs with transhuman-like heuristical capabilities in their area of expertise. Non-sapient. Workhose of heuristical software and transhuman society. Comparable to very sophisticated VI networks in performance.

 **MIS:** Military Intelligence Service

 **OSI:** Office of Space Intelligence

 **ScatterBug:** An eezonic device, used to destroy modern diamonoid or other windows that cannot be shattered by convenrtional sonic resonance.

 **TITAN/CERBERUS:** Systems Alliance Cyberdefense ASI; Cluster of the TITAN system.

 **Trigraphics:** Three-dimensional volumetric projection technology, creating so-called Trigraphs. Unlike, holograms, which create the illusion of depth on a projection medium, Trigraphics are perfectly volumetric - As long as sufficient clear raypaths remain from the projectors to the projector volume, a problem side-stepped by sorounding the projection space with hundreds of individual projectors, making image disruption impossible.


	2. Leakage Pt 2

Batou looked down the SACOG sight of his M-96A3 Mattock and aimed the weapon downrange, finger on the trigger guard, at one of the fifty metre targets. The smart sight delivered range, temperature, target vector and other ballistic data smoothly, and as Batou flipped through the IFF trigger settings the weapon locked itself out as required as he aimed it at the wall, a "hostile" tagged target, and a "friendly" tagged target. With a satisfied nod he returned to the armory from the range, laid the unfolded Mattock down on one table, and retrieved his LMR200 "Bushwacker" LMG to do the same check-up.

He inspected the open thermal clip slot and its metallic thermal contact surfaces, the feeder, and the unfolded "fins" of the heatsinks and radiators, then subjected the shaver system to the same inspection after inserting a test clip into the thermal clip slot. Both slots presented gleaming and ready shaver elements;satisfied, he retrieved the two fresh ammo blocks, one Armor-Piercing HDN and the other APHEI Raufoss, from the table. He removed the solid plastic packing with a tug on the indicated plastic strip and retrieved the exposed ammo block with care. The pre-etched fault lines of the block glimmered in the OLED lights as Batou inserted both blocks, checked the block well-mounted indicators for their green lights indicating correct seating, shaver alignment, and functionality, then slammed the ammo block hatch shut and returned to the range, shouldering the M200.

Besides him, someone rotated a drum, then stopped and secured it - It arrested with a click. "So you're still using that thing", Batou remarked, butt of the LMR200 pressed against his shoulder, cheek on the stock, right sleepless eye looking down the sight of the weapon.

"Yes", Togusa simply confirmed and raised his OMD-780 revolver, sighting down the mounted red dot optic.

Batou shook his head slightly and removed himself from the firing range, moving to stow his weapons in several padded weapon cases. He never fully understood why exactly Togusa insisted on using such an old weapon that still took (admittedly hard-hitting, but still!) chemical rounds instead of the pre-etched Unitary Body ammo blocks used in modern mass drivers. Togusa had explained his reasons - his revolver was essentially unjammable, reliable to a fault, and boasted high stopping power - several times and with conviction. Batou still prefered his top-of-the-line milspec firearms.

The Major was currently busy getting her Shell Suit out of its storage closet and into a man-sized padded case for transport. The suit was designed to lock into her cyborg shell and augment its capüabilities further, bypassing the space and weight limitations of the bionic body design; made of thin layers of artificial muscle and a skeletal linear frame underneath scaled black skin and armor plating over the torso and legs, the arms and legs exposing the bionic design of the artificial musculature. The helmet was a molded two-piece with an armored visor with a spread of tiny lenses over the eye section.

Batou had never seen the Major without her gunmetal black Lockheed Cybernetics Stalker-M6 during operations; she had worn the suit since her days in the 501st Special CyberOps, where he had met her during the second Verge War. The stealth-optimized suit was a clear favorite of hers, despite the two other Shell suits also stored in Section 9's inventory for the Major. Next to the Shell Suit storage case rested her own weapons, the Seburo NCS-2i combat carbine and her two prefered pistols already checked and locked up in their own cases for transport.

Saito was currently working on one of his sniper rifles, having retrieved it from his own locker, checking the heavy, magazine-fed railgun with the use of a diagnostics probe he was slowly feeding down the barrel, staring into space as he was watching the results on an AR display with intense focus. A Seburo NCS-4M carbine with underbarrel shotgun mount and overbarrel stacked grenade launcher was already laying on his section of the large central equipment table, together with a collapsed tripod-mounted spotter robot, a heavy-duty custom MS-6 Carnifex, a lighter collapsable back-up gun, and loaded magazines for the sniper rifle next to a series of still sealed ammo blocks and two cases of fresh thermal clips.

Borma had just removed the missile they would use to deliver the nanothermobaric warhead out of a munitions casing; now he was carefully mounting the NTB warhead atop of the missile, screwing it into the thread of the missile top with carefully measured movements of his right hand, steadying the missile with his left. Then, he gingerly lowered the missile back into the munitions container, and closed it. The case with the missile launcher was resting next to it; he grabbed both cases, placing them on the table with the rest of the weapons sitting on the table.

Ishikawa, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen; his weapons and gear were already in one large and two small cases on the table, clearly labeled like everybody else's equipment.

Two rooms over, behind a two-door airlock inside a sealed vault, the man in question was currently busy pulling big, shielded cases out of storage shelves, opening them and checking the contents within - standardised racks with infowarfare hardware, surrounded by periphery devices and bundled cables: Solid-State Memory and High-Density Crystal storage devices, racks with Nanofluid Adaptive Computation and Quantum Encryption Cracker processors, several AI core servers, Terragate routers, ICE and Firewall Racks; all top-quality gear Section 9 custom-ordered for its operations.

With a satisfied sound in his beard Ishikawa closed the cases with resounding clacks, and arrayed them on another table, before grabbing several 2.5" Solid-State Memory drives and slotting them into the hot-swap slots of a server console.

"Right. One time Earth Singapore Groundport Dataflague sets and Infowarfare Set 'Black Dance 04', please", he murmured as he typed in the requests on the keyboard, accessing Section 9s air-gapped cyberwarfare servers. The system accepted his ID and began retrieving the requested software and datasets after a second; a long list of file names with a massive variety of types filling up on the screen. "And start transferring." Ishikawa entered his ID again, confirmed the SSDs as the target devices, and started the transfer with a hit of the enter key. After a second of watching the files transfer over, he turned back inside the vault and began taking more bundled cables out of a storage closet from rows of hooks, packing them into a general-purpose suitcase he took from another shelf, orderly packing the bundles into it. "Better safe than sorry", he murmured.

Behind him, the blackout airlock to the storage vault hissed open. Paz was standing in the door: "Sorry to interrupt, but the rest of the team has finished packing up, and they're waiting for you." His eyes wandered over to the desk. "You need help with this?", he asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Would be appreciated", Ishikawa said through clenched teeth as he worked out how exactly he could carry four of the cases with his arms, his face changing from concentration to frustration as he, rather predictably, failed to do so. Paz smiled discreetly, and took two backpack carrying rigs of a shelf.

"Forgot those?", he smiled as he slung one of the heavy cases on the back of one rig, and hoisted the straps over his shoulder before grabbing another two cases with his hands. Ishikawa only made a grunting noise in response as he secured one heavy and two light cases on the rig and carried the last two by hand.

"Right then", Ishikawa said, keying on the integrated eezonic Counter-Mass system to help him lift the heavy cases easier. "Let's go."

* * *

The armory level rested directly above deep storage, an automated ware- and storehouse that held everything from the manifold loadout pallets to ammunition, replacement parts, vehicles, fuel and fuel cells, along with whatever else Section 9 needed to do its job - Including such mundane things such as groceries for the kitchens.

The armory level was designed to converge on a set of wide corridors that permitted the passage of vehicles, leading towards a set of security checkpoints sandwiched between a pair of massive airlock doors and active Kiggs fields. This time around the security was a simple walk-through, one after another, through a fifteen-meter scanning corridor that swept them for any unauthorized devices, substances or other pieces of matter. A returning Cargo lifter was subjected to a more thorough sweep, dozens of Sensor spiders crawling across the yellow machine to search for possible nanocreep, mites, or any other unwanted hangers-on.

One of the cargo elevators was already waiting for the departing team beyond the security checkpoint, filled with several pre-packed military cargo containers used for military space shipping: airtight, lightly armored and heavily reinforced, a set of giant QR codes printed on the side. "Mobilisation L2/01", "Mobilisation L2/02" and "Mobilisation L2/03" and serial numbers were also helpfully printed in English and Mandarin on the sides. System Alliance typical - Redundancy at every corner, Batou thought. Someone with implants or AR specs could have deciphered the codes in real time - But what if those systems were not available? Logistics had to be able to run on Mk.I Eyeball and analogue at least to some level.

Batou was slinging a whole four big equipment bags, Togusa lifting two. In retrospect, Alliance military Biomods were in themselves impressive. During his time in StarPol Togusa would have had no chance of lifting this much, much less before.

"Right, everything in?" Borma gave a look through the elevator. "Going down." He hit the elevator controls, and the heavy doors slid close and sealed with a hiss. The elevator went into motion with a background whirr.

Togusa remembered the loadout. Right now they were descending through a 100 meter service layer of the Stanford habitat wheel "floor", and a large set of security doors and laser traps. The spaceborn docks were the best point for a potential hostile party to assault the Section 9 building without passing through any other of the Arcturus Station security, and as such secured against easy intrusion. Even if hostiles managed to breach the hangar security checkpoints and then the elevators, the upper security checkpoints would either cut them to shreds or at least hold them long enough for the remaining building to turn into a fortress secured by a battalion of bleeding-edge war robots.

Then came another 50 meters of hangar, and the elevator came to a stop on the ground floor of the Public Security Section 9 Hangar. The armored doors hissed open, revealing the polished polymer ground floor of the hangar, coated to offer maximum grip. The base color was a dark tarmac black, then painted over with lines, boxes, patterns and letters in a dozen bright primary colors - White guidance lines, yellow and red warnings, parking fields and elevatoring storage sections in green, bright and dark blue, and violet.

SSV In Shadow Waiting was resting four hundred meters down the hangar, in the second berth spinward from the Elevator column. With a semi-aerodynamic outer hull that flared into multiple pairs of "wings" at the back as corporations often prefered, outwardly it looked like any other corporate light cruiser used as a fast courier or for VIP transport. Just as they approached, the exterior reconfigured from a base blank filled with test patterns to the violet, pink, blue hues with white highlights of Shinshouseki Inc., with the registration number STTV-63220 and the ship's "official" name "SCS Dejima Maru" written on the radiator "wings" and the forward body of the craft.

The craft was currently still restrained inside a web of cargo and personnel gangways, heavy mechanical docking arms, and the station-side utility and support feeds - Cryogenic fuel and remass, power, cooling, data. A level below the "shore" deck, several yellow-painted multi-gravity loading bots were shifting crates aboard SSV In Shadow Waiting through one of the cargo gangways, their six legs and big feet stomping on the deck.

On their way towards the right boarding gangway, they passed by another one of Section 9's starships - one of their Philosopher-class Recon/Assault/Information Supremacy Light Cruisers, the SSV Fujibayashi Nagato. The faceted three-sided dagger of a starship had apparently just returned, as her crew and personnel were still disembarking en masse and the ship was surrounded by its flight and deck crew working on connecting utility feeds from the ceiling.

"You guys headed out?", a Japanese-American in casual grey-black spacer one-piece shouted over to Batou and Togusa, who were trailing behind the Major at the front.

"Yeah," Batou shouted back, and gave a knowing glance. James Takeshi nodded in understanding.

"Well, good luck to you man!" he shouted as he and his team headed for the Elevators.

"Hey, thanks!" Batou shouted back with a grin. Sorry, but can't let you know where we are going or why. You know the drill, his expression said.

The next surprise waited for them on the pier that sat between Fujibayashi Nagato and In Shadow Waiting. Several skeletal racks had already been brought ashore and now rested there, awaiting transport, big power cords plugged into power stations that had extruded themselves from the floor.

"Mr. Batou!", a youthful voice thundered across the pier courtesy of the riot control-rated loudspeaker array. The whole team jolted, and the hands of the Major, Paz and Saito jumped towards their belts before stopping.

"Hey!", Batou shouted back with a smile. A whole eight Shinkawa Heavy Industries QPPCS-90X "Tachikoma" Thinktanks were secured in one of the racks, in various states of combat damage; two of the chassis were wrecked beyond repair and hung limply inside their racks, with one of them opened up like an oversized crab all the way to the processing core, exposing warped superstructure, cabling, and two wholesale scorched fuel cell arrays. Every unit was marred with bullet holes of various sizes; one of the still active ones was missing one of its primary manipulator arms, with only the stump of the body ball joint remaining. All had sustained some form of damage to sensors, many looking like the plasma and scorch marks of lasers.

"Ouch. Got shot up pretty bad on the last Op?!", Batou sympathetically remarked to the Tachikomas.

"What the heck did you do to them?", he asked one of the Operators, Pierre Gordon, standing nearby.

"What, the Tachikomas? That's nothing!". Gordon thumped towards other racks for combat robots.

Togusa winced visibly. Over half of the humanoid chassis were wrecked beyond functionality, blown up by heavy-duty anti-material weapons. A Titan Armories ASCR-55E Force Recon Spidertank had been similarly subjected to heavy punishment; one of its eight legs was ripped off and the main turret on the back had been holed in two places. It was only held up by yellow braces so it could be stowed on its cargo pallet.

"The fuck you run into?", Borma asked surprised.

"Turns out raiding a ACI HQ on an ice moon means encountering heavy firepower. Who would have thought!" Gordon remarked sarcastically, arms stemmed into the sides.

"Sorry for 'ya." Batou stopped at the gangway to In Shadow Waiting right-side personnel boarding airlock.

"Don't be! This shit's supposed to be expendable..." ("Hey! We are not expendable!" "Yes we are!") "...and we lost nobody from the assault team. Damn lucky if anything! And hey, good luck to you!".

"Thanks. Have a nice AAR with the Old Ape!". Batou turned around and followed the team down the Gangway, and into the Airlock. The door hissed closed behind them, and the Decontamination cycle began.

* * *

"Right then." Captain Karah Edwards, CO of CSQB/IIS-53 SSV In Shadow Waiting dropped into the captain's chair with a sight, securing her blue mug with the white System Alliance Space Force logo on the side, filled to the brim with hot coffee, in the appropriate holder on the heavy acceleration chair, and belted herself in. "XO, how are we looking?"

Javier Palacio looked up from his display for a second, making eye contact: "Good so far. Cargo is stowed and locked, we are awaight, and the mission team is aboard. All personnel is accounted for and shipside, foreigners are clear. Permission to seal the craft?".

"Granted." Edwards turned to the bridge at large. "Right, PriFly by station. Helm and Astrogation?"

"Preflight checks on avionics, engines, reactors, core and gens shows green across the board. Containments are calc'ed and calibrated, and Mass Distribution Profile is loaded. RCS and Flywheels check out, and FTL drive systems are green. Nav Systems are synched, we have preliminary EM Sync on Star, Planet, Beacon and Inertial. Flight Plan is typed in, set and has been confirmed by SysCon. Fuel and Remass are topped out."

"Power and Heat?"

"Reactors are set on Position 1 Ionize, coils, chambers, injectors, separators, ionizers are green. Generators are spun up and ready, Cap is charged for ignition. TMS is circulating on stationside, primary and secondary circuits under pressure, Radiators all ready for duty and ready-cycling in the cold. Power is stationside and ready for switchover to boardside, Ultracaps are full, secondaries are go, APUs are cycling on idle."

One after another, the teams reported the readiness of SSV In Shadow Waiting to depart. Finally, Edwards finished with a last summery, more for the official Flight Log: "Preflight checklist is complete with no issues, SSV In Shadow Waiting is ready for Flight. Coms, get DockCon on the line - We are ready for sep' and dep'."

* * *

 **PUBLIC SECURITY SECTION 9 INTERNAL NETWORK / WIKI AND FORUM**

 **OPPOSITION AND THREAT DATABASE**

Alliance for Colonial Independence (ACI)

The ACI has its origins in the aftermath of the American Colonial War that was fought from 2187 to 2189, partially overlapping with the Outer Fringe War. After the loss of Colonial Independence Forces during the ACW, the ACI formed itself from military remnants, disfranchised colonists, and terrorist groups, vowing to continue the fight for independence.

Like the Outer Fringe Coalition remnants, the ACI has proven itself hard to stamp out. The group operates extensively throughout the hard to surveil colonial space, using otherwise non- or underdeveloped systems to establish bases for their operations. An extensive network of sympathizers and their own spotters warn these bases of incoming incursions or Alliance surveillance operations, allowing these bases to reduce their footprint and cancel visible operations. ACI leadership appears decentralized in a complex cell system; though a higher leading council has been suspected, no leading individuals for the overarching ACI have been identified by SA intelligence.

So far, ACI operations have been reduced to supporting local insurgencies, memetic warfare and aggregation with the goal of binding System Alliance peacekeeper units, and terror attacks. Raids on major ACI operations however show that the ACI is marshalling not unsubstantial military and paramilitary forces in their hidden bases and the colonial fringe, with an increasing influx of modified Citadel space equipment and also citadel space operators who have joined their cause either as Mercs or other people of advisory capacity. Foreign intelligence influence cannot be excluded. The ACI has also been known to have contacts with Wildcatt colonies and insurgencies in other species spaces, such as turian separatists.

The ACI is rated as a high risk to System Alliance security. Between a growing fleet of Q-craft and open warships, though of older make, their increasing subversion of colonial society in not only the former american territories but now also spinward colonial space, and continues terrorist attacks, the ACI would represent a major drain on System Alliance military resources and demand decades in peacekeeping operation and expensive interstellar surveillance.

The current Section 9 Operations for the ACI are prevention of ACI terrorist attacks, and execution of raids on known ACI holdings together with other intelligence services and System Alliance Special Forces. Long-term goals are infiltration, subversion, and reduction of ACI support.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** For those wondering why the Ammo blocks are mentioned to be pre-etched, this universe does not work with the rather nonsensical and unworkable sand grain-size definition for mass driver ammunition. Ammo blocks are instead unitery blocks with roughly pre-shaped ammunition, commonly flechetes, who have more mass and size but are still very small even compared with regular railgun rounds. The shaver breaks this pre-etched ammunition out of the larger block, then potentialy custom-shapes and modifies these flechetes before they are feed to the accelerator. Firing velocities on a modern mass driver are high-hypersonic. Round capacity per block is still enourmus.

 **A/N(Nick):** How the fuck I fucked that upload up?


	3. Leakage Pt 3

[SAIN\\\MIN\\\IV/OUN\\\s9\\\opfeed\connecting...]

[ March 22nd, 2232 | 18:56:41 Local ]

[ Operation BLIND LILLY ]

[ Mission Objective: Asset Denial, permanent neutralization of HVT-1 and HVT-2 ]

[ Operation Status: Live ]

[ 18:56:42 ]...

[ 18:56:43 ]...

* * *

The ocean glittered in the evening light, low sun reflecting off the stream of airborne traffic. Ahead, Hilton Megaplex Tower 4 was a contrast-heavy shadow stabbing out of a white-yellow reflecting mass. Against the yellow-blue sky and orange clouds and tinting into the blue at the outer edges the only illumination visible was from small trigraphic projections and the blinking of vehicle warning lights.

Below them, the sea was sloshing through the gap between sea-city platforms, breaking itself on the connecting pylons between the underwater superstructure and the above-surface platforms. The buzz of electro-jet engines was omnipresent, a robotic insect swarm of various cargo drones, aircars, airtrucks, and more classic VTOLs buzzing about, flying to and from hundreds of air garages and robot hives through the various airlanes.

"Eagle, this is Falcon. Status?"

Saito shifted behind the scope of his sniper rifle, adjusting the position of his helmet on the cheek-rest of the stock ever so slightly. "Falcon, Eagle-One, all good on our end."

He accessed the Hawkeye ballistic computer and checked both settings and diagnostics. "Hawkeye has integrated spotter assets data. Got a good composite view of the suite internals -HVT-One is present and waiting on the lower meeting floor. Seven meters away from the window. Nervously pacing."

"Copy Eagle-1. Eagle-2?".

Next to Saito, Borma had unpacked his own gear on the maintenance walkway they were using as a sniper position. They were alone, save for a few now-hacked maintenance robots mostly concerning themselves with cleaning the glass and maintaining the outside infrastructure against the corrosive seawater spray; the machines were utterly ignorant to the two armed and armored men that had taken position near the edge of the building. Their position overlooked the Hilton Mexaplex platform, and provided a clear view of the oceanfront beyond and the perimeter drifts of other platforms which dotted the horizon.

"All set, Major. Missile flight path is programmed to avoid the airlanes," Borma reported working his shoulders underneath the shouldered missile launcher.

"Good. Stand-by, Section 6 Net just reported HVT-Two has entered the building. All callsigns, prepare for assault."

Four hundred meters away and another seventy-five meters up, Motoko Kusanagi's visor was locked on the streams of streaking aircar lights. She had taken an easy knee next to the safety railing of the maintenance catwalk, a lightweight "Spider" Attachment & Descend System clamped to the railing and connected via a thin but strong carbon nanotube weave rope with the ascension rig of the Stalker-M6.

Her mind, however, was not occupied with registering the visual input from her artificial eyes as anything but real-world background noise. Rather, her focus was on the internal cyberverse that permeated realspace and went beyond, virtual camera eyes gazing upon HVT-Two, Hendal Wim, as he and three salarian bodyguards entered an elevator. Other virtual eyes watched Section 6 Covert Agents in the lobby, and other digital "feelers" in the network fed her knowledge of Section 6s cybernetic surveillance measures. Calls went out over the internal network, discretely intercepted and then relayed to her by Ishikawa using the backdoors Arakami's contact had provided; the Section 6 Assault teams were moving in now. They wouldn't have long for the strike; two minutes at most.

More than enough time for her.

"HVT-Two is approaching the meeting site. Stand-by to execute." She stood up and vaulted over the railing with a CouMass-assisted flex of her legs, using a hand to steady the jump. The ascension rig pulled the descend line taut, and she rested in abseiling position, feet on the catwalk floor, hands free.

"HVT-Two is on the floor. ETA to suite, thirty seconds," Togusa reported over the Net.

"Copy", the Major replied.

Next to him, Ishikawa made a grimace. "Major, HVT-Two has increased data traffic in the spimes and relay nodes around him, and I'm seeing encrypted traffic in the network running through backbones it shouldn't. He's getting digital cover shadowing," he concluded.

Inside his own implant's vision, Ishikawa was feeding renders of the hotel network traffic activity, as localized by end nodes and users, into his visual interface, allowing him to see what caused the most traffic and where. Assisted by a special Body-Image-Interface that located and described network activity through bodily feelings Ishikawa could feel the network traffic. He saw the network activity as white, blue, violet and green renders over an orange-yellow semi-transparent wireframe render of the Hilton Megaplex Tower Four and its interior; the network hardlines veins and nerves, the mesh a complex weave of lines, end devices a variety of simple symbols and geometric shapes.

His cerebral Direct Neural Interfaces then took over the detailed mental work, pipping him the network data for deeper analysis by his own augmented mind and the dozens of subroutines and a cluster of infowarfare AIs that busily talked among themselves and with him from their racks on the other side of the aircar's cargo space.

Ishikawa frowned as he processed the information and meta-data analysis. With practiced efficiency he directed several routines under his command to grab various executive files of the unknown traffic off a traffic backbone via a government backdoor covered by various anonymizer and stealth programs. A quick trawl by one of two dedicated Enemy Software Analysis AIs revealed known STG code in several segments, mixed with a wide array of Citadel and human space-sourced code. Part of the traffic was a heavily end-to-end encrypted connection he couldn't attack without drawing attention to himself; the various subversion softwares were apparently trying to get in as early as possible, directly attacking and subverting spimes to splice their traffic off to the unknown source. Further discreet snooping revealed that the Limited Artificial Intelligence systems of the hotel security had apparently been subverted days ago; Ishikawa found several active backdoors that were introducing logic subversion worms into the system.

That explained why the LAIs weren't reacting much to Ishikawa's discrete introduction of the Dataflague shunts - their threat detection logic had been subverted by the second party. _Here's hoping they haven't seen to much of our traffic yet. These guys are good._ "You're seeing this Major?" he asked, sending her a package with the most important activity flagged.

"I see it," the Major confirmed. "ETA on the HVT?"

"Ten seconds," Togusa replied, tensing up. He threw a glance over to Ishikawa, who was rapidly hacking away on the physical inputs. His eyes returned to his own screens, watching the sensor fusion render of Wim and his guards, stopping before the door of Suite 0632. His eyes flickered to the biometric readouts on the four. The guards were attentive, but not overtly alarmed;Wim was calm, the "jump rate" of his eyes per minute - a calm, assured number for a salarian, his posture collected and controlled. Good. They hadn't spooked their targets overtly by any chance. The heavy digital shadowing however was… discomforting. The STG was good, that much Togusa had come to understand quickly, but Ishikawa acted like the other party had near absolute control - and that was not supposed to be happening, not on Earth, not in a Hilton, and certainly not against Section 9.

One of the guards raised a physical keycard to the lock of the suite, holding it into a trigraphic reader space; Togusa returned his attention to his own screen "HVT is at the door." One of the guards shifted, for a second seemed to gaze straight into the camera. "All Callsigns, Eagle-One. HVT-One is approaching the door...and the door is open." Trigraphic wood panels vanished into the doorframe in a complicated pattern, than the actual door slided into the side frames, splitting open in the middle. Togusa gazed upoon the face of Commodore Juan Carlo Martinez, wearing a simple blue System Alliance uniform. Martinez's biometric readout was a near-polar opposite of the salarians and especially Wim's; he was nervous, fidgeting at the mere sight of the salarians..

 _So, probably honey-trapped. Sorry buddy._

Togusa took a deep breath, tried to calm fingers which were suddenly trembling. His lips located the straw, and he gulped down some liquid against his dry throat. The liquid was soothingly cool. "HVTs have contact. Moving for the meeting room."

"Section 6 squads are arriving. Our window is closing", Ishikawa cautioned.

The Major's voice was cool, suddenly edging into the robotic: " _Copy. All Callsigns, Falcon is going in._ "

* * *

[ _Combat Systems on._ }

[/sys/ _Activating_ ]

[/sys/ _Neural Awareness Acceleration: 2x._ ]

Neurocircuitry woke from sleep mode, weaves of complex fibres, microscopic nodes and swarms of micro- and nanometer-sized robotic agents beginning their manipulation of neurons, axons and synaptic knobs. Fibre lasers discharged precise frequencies, triggering genetically engineered receptor nodes on neuronal bodies; the first steps of an internal biochemical and bioelectric cascade. In other places, where artificial elements penetrated through cell membranes, artificial secretors and electrodes discharged; ions and micro currents surging into neurons. Within two seconds, artificial activity in Kusanagi's heavily augmented brain spikes; carefully grafted xenotissue with modified properties being awoken from sleep and spliced into active neural activity. Electrode array chips surged with activity, sending signals down spliced neural pathways deeper into the brain.

The neuroprosthetic augmentations that had replaced or added to existing neural structures reacted differently; as soon as configuration packets arrived from regular CPU sets sitting on the brain's surface, nanoscopic neural elements shifted and reconfigured their onboard processing units.

More data arrived from external sources, running the translation of the DNI software, before being distributed by internal network switches to the manifold input interfaces of neural augmentations; traffic arrived in return, was translated for machine convenience, trawled for orders, knowledge, intention and awareness.

Within milliseconds, the Major vanished under an exploding tide of combat subroutines.

[/sys/ _Augmentations online. No faults during Boot._ ]

She sent a single Mindcom. _Speech is too inefficient, too slow at this point._ [ Copy. All Callsigns, Falcon is going in. ]

 _Two targets. Engagement position calculated. Abseiling time - 6 seconds. Commencing physical positioning._

She flexed her legs, then catapulted herself away from the catwalk in a powerful jump. The ascension rig began spooling off the wire, and gravity asserted its pull, accelerating her downwards. She fell, slightly spreading her arms and legs to adjust her air resistance, arms swinging to apply momentum that wpi;d flip her feet over head downwards in 1 second, the first half of a backflip that would end with head upwards, feet on the glass, ready to fire on targets HVT-1 and HVT-2.

Somewhere in the back of her awareness, a flare of joy surfaced; a microcurrent thumb pressed down on the dopamine discharge but it kindled deep down, inside her Ghost. Then it vanished obediently under the combat implants.

 _Time to engagement position - 3 seconds._

* * *

Saito watched the shape of the Major falling down the facade of the Hilton with a third eye - implants sitting in the visual cortex and its artificial biological extensions feeding him the image from one of the SpotterBots ball-mounted tracking photosensors. Under the effects of a 4x awareness acceleration, the black shape of her shell suit performed a seemingly slow, diver-like roll.

At the same time, he moved his arms, shifting his scope ever so slightly. The Hawkeye threw ballistic calculations and the fire mission for Wim's first guard as both direct knowledge into his mind and ARO visuals into his field of vision, and he shifted the crosshair onto the indicated position. Between the environmental sensors on the three bionic seagull drones, the SpotterBot next to him and inside the electronic scope of his own rifle, the Hawkeyes mathematical processors could crunch the fire mission with enormous reliability .They knew projectile mass, barrel parameters, possessed a high-fidelity wind, humidity and heat map derived from the arrays of mapping lasers and multi-frequency holographic scanners mounted on the drones and SpotterBot; any remaining accuracy issues could be easily corrected between Saito's own augmentations designed to limit weapon sway through breath, cardiovascular, and muscle control, the actuators of the combat suit he was wearing, the integrated mechanical aim assist of the rifle, and the smart guidance system of the 12mm railgun sabot that now rested in the breach, ready to be rammed down the accelerator.

Inside the scope, the target indicator came to rest on the head of the first guard, standing still, and Saito took a deep breath, inhaled.

 _3… 2.._

He exhaled, and laid his finger on the trigger.

Held the breath.

 _1._

He fired.

In the center of the bolt, electromagnetic coils energized, and a tiny linear motor embedded into the bolt slammed a ramming rod forward in the span of milliseconds. The projectile was driven forward, and made contact with the two superconductive rails of the accelerator. Dozens of kilowatts of power surged through the superconductive armature of the projectile, and it began its journey down the accelerator.

By the time the sabot erupted from the muzzle and the central flechette came clear of the disintegrating sabot, it had reached a velocity of Mach 7 and had achieved a kinetic energy of 25 kilojoules - Splitting the air and causing water to condense into a white hazy trail in its wake.

* * *

Kusanagi completed the flip, and brought her feet upwards. The ascension rig arrested the line, and with a tug her fall stopped, turning into an arc that led straight towards the lower window face of Penthouse Suite 0632. Her left hand held the ScatterBug device steadily, attachment side away from her hand, while the right came down to rest on the back of the grip of her expanded Seburo ETH-2 inside its holster.

In her ARO, the five targets were glowing yellow figures visible through the sight-blocking facade and floors, two of them with red outlines and target squares over their heads. A blue line connected with another; the ballistic aim indicator of Saito's sniper rifle.

Her optics adjusted to penetrate the suites glass, and she saw Martinez and Wim, with the guards arrayed to watch the suites entrance hall; the two were apparently engaged in small talk. Wim's eyes suddenly changed direction, focused over Martinez shoulder. The man had just noticed and his body began shifting in preparation to turn when her feet slammed into the glass, and she slapped the ScatterBug against the glass.

The device expanded a series of mass effect field geometries, and began exerting forces on the glass with specific frequencies, tugging from the inner side, switching to tug from the outer side. The glass began to audibly vibrate, strained - then the ScatterBug activated its Warp charge, introducing the final stress that pushed the glass beyond its durability. The thick pane of silicone and diamonoid that could have stopped the impact of an aircar or an airborne drone broke into a thousand tiny slivers - Exposing Martinez and Wim to the outside elements.

 _Obstacle removed. Target HVT-1 - Distance 6 meters. X-Angle 11.6°. Y-Angle 21.2°. Target: Head and Neck. Goal: Destruction of cranial case, brain matter, and Stack. Ballistic Lock achieved. Engaging._

She pulled the trigger on her pistol, still one-handed. The weapon slammed the 5mm explosive sabot in the breach forward, and into the accelerator. Nanoscopic eezo cores arrayed along the gauss accelerator in a triangular pattern fluxed with current, emitting dark energy that was captured and directed by waveguides towards the accelerator proper. Solid-state emitter components modulated the field, and the air and projectile within the accelerator barrel suddenly seemed to lose mass as the Mass Effect metric manifested itself; the gramm-heavy flechette turning into a tenth-gram object. Thus lightened, the gauss accelerator fired the projectile out of the muzzle at Mach 10, and straight into Martinez's head.

The projectile slammed into Martinez's neck, where head and spine met, burrowing itself into the flesh in a bright flash as parts of the projectile evaporated away, a compression shockwave expanding across the skin, the flesh caving in around the wound before exploding outwards in a slow spray of skin parts, blood, and covering flesh.

She fired a second, then a third time into his braincase proper, then shifted her aim towards Wim, second hand coming up to steady the pistol. The salarian had got as far as turning to dive behind a couch, presenting his head's right side to her: a perfect target.

She fired three shots into him as well, all three hitting their computer-guided marks in a triangular spread all over the head, penetrating through the outer skin, synthetic anchoring and nurturing surface before hitting the braincase and drilling through the alloy-composite shell and shock gel that protected the augmented brain within. Only then the smart fuzes embedded within the projectiles detonated the explosive payload, sending buckminsterfullerene nanocomposite shrapnel into the neuronal tissue .

The first salarian guard was unfolding a handgun from a prosthetic arm holster when Saito's round flashed into the suite on the Majors left and caught him straight in the head, detonating an instant later; the bodyguards barrier flashing and failing in an instant. The other two guards had just taken cover, one behind a chair and another behind a wall, when the other two rounds arrived in quick succession; both were thrown across the room, their heads spilling salarian flesh, blood, white ECF fluid and grey-pallet colored cybernetic components.

"HVTs are down!", Togusa confirmed on the Net.

"Moving to Phase two." Ishikawa chimed in. "Section 6 is in the elevator. Building alarms are suppressed and Dataflague is holding. Engaging enemy digital cover for maximum effect." Ishikawa triggered the carefully placed attack software he had prepared all throughout the network, and watched as they all went into action in the same instant, cutting network connections, attacking the enemy bandwidth and shredding software into digital junk while forcing reboots on subverted spimes and network nodes. Then he moved onto the offensive and began chipping away at the remote connection, funneling trojans disguised as normal data packets down the channels.

The response was quicker than he liked, the opposition's own hacking attempts throwing themselves against his defensive barriers, but so far the digital battle was in Ishikawa's favor, and he prepared his withdrawal from the cybernetic battlefield.

On the overwatch position, Borma flipped the safety of the launcher. The ARO window of the missile confirmed his orientation and the target, and the trajectory in between the two.

[ SHOOT ]

"NTB is locked!", he shouted.

"Backblast clear!", Saito confirmed, already getting up from his shooting position.

"Major, get out of there. Firing!" Borma depressed the trigger.

She threw a last look into the room. Martinez head was complete and utter mulch - Not a chance of recovering either neural matter, his implants or the stack. Wim's head was a similar mess of flesh, shellskin, and cyberbrain components. Perfect.

Her Shell Suit made her acutely aware of the white contrail of the NTB round racing towards her and the suite. With a neural command she disengaged the Cable Spider above her, and gave herself over the pull of gravity as she send another neural command.

[ /i\ ENGAGING THERMOPTIC CAMOUFLAGE /i\ ]

[ |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| [ 20% ] _]

With a Flicker, the thermoptic camouflage began engaging, muddying her outlines as the sensor and display elements began replicating the environment on the skin of the Shell suit, peltier elements cooling and heating the skin. The glass facade, a silvery image of herself and the cityscape over her head, blurred as she picked up speed. From her perspective, the NTB missile drew a white contrail from above downwards, and through the facade into the suite.

A moment of silence.

Then the flames of the thermobaric explosion burst outwards, sending the remaining glass with them in a ocean of orange and red. The shockwave hit her, let the thermoptic camouflage flicker for just a second-

-and then she vanished into the cityscape, a final ripple on the foaming waves on a sunlit sea, arms spreading out to unfold transparent wings.

* * *

 _/. Data of Interest Recovery Operation 21204 failed_

 _/. This could be expected. We will acquire desired data or equivalent through other means for us_

 _/. A momentary setback. The Plan is still in motion. Acquisition and Aggregation is moving within nominal timeframe. The Plan is not threatened._

 _/. We will have our ascension_

* * *

 _Transhuman technology has changed our society in many ways. The ability to throw off our inborn weaknesses and augment our strengths, to breathe in a dozen atmospheres, to live free of the chains of our natural bodies, and to open our minds to the wider dataverse of our own creation._

 _But this is not just a positive change. With DNIs, Cyberbrains, Cyborg Shells and AGI came more crime,_ new _crime. Infocrime threatens the very foundations, thoughts and Ghosts of people; Cyberterrorists are harder to kill, kill better, and evade detection easier._

 _And now these threats are not only undermining human society, but Citadel Space as well. And as human criminals, terrorists and groups of interests have exploited new technologies in the past, so are Citadel actors moving to do so now. We are all threatened equally._

 _A special response is needed to address these new threats. A unit with the firepower, equipment, wits and skills to face any Cyberterrorist, and contain the worst and most clever of Infocrimes._

 _That response is Public Security Section 9._

 _My name is Motoko Kusanagi. Welcome to the Galaxy of 2232._

* * *

 **A/N** : Enjoy!


	4. Leakage- Aftermath

**[SAIN\\\MOD\\\SAMIA\\\IS\s_rtPL_984155\\\\_communications]**

* * *

 **SAIN Terminal Access System v3.85665**  
 **Accessing IP 9845.66885.445211.55416**  
 **April 5th, 2232**

 **SYSTEM ALLIANCE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE AGENCY**  
 **INTERNAL SECURITY DIVISION**

 **INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS ARCHIVE - DIRECTOR TAIMEI KUBOTA**

* * *

/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\  
 **EYES ONLY** **DEEP EYES SENTIENT** **AND ABOVE**  
 **UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM ACCESS CARRIES IMMEDIATE LETHAL ICE PENALTIES**  
/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

* * *

CASE FILE #988445112-BRTEEV-0065412567  
SUBJECT: Attempted Information Leak from OMIS by OMIS Official Juan Carlo Martinez

Subsection: Review, Investigation and Analysis

 **PUBLIC KEY 984555112-PHDBAPAOKDHHG-9887455112545-ODJDHSLSAOAPAODFDJABFDBDGS  
TIMESTAMP: MARCH 29th, 2232 | 1035 Hours**

FROM: Senior Operations Supervisor Itaki Reindorf  
TO: Director of Counterintelligence Operations Taimei Kubota  
SUBJECT: Initial Review Case #988445112-BRTEEV-0065412567

Director Kobuta,

We have concluded the initial review of the attempted information leak by OMIS official Commodore Juan Carlo Martinez. At this point in time we can assemble the first comprehensive picture of the entire case and the actions taken by our government agencies, and what has been ascertained about Martinez actions and those of the hostile party that had and potentially has penetrated the OMIS at the highest level.

Frankly, Sir, the level of penetration the enemy achieved is worrying in the extreme, and so is the enemy party's target. We have confirmed Martinez carried 56 terabytes of ASI codelines and operation logs, including a copy of specific parts of the SAIN YGGDRASIL data backbone architecture, on an implanted storage system. Thankfully, the Black Ops to neutralize Martinez thoroughly slagged the storage device; we are certain none of this data could be transmitted to the Salarian courrier. Penetration this deep is worrying; no enemy party should have enough intelligence on us to specify to Martinez what parts of the YGGDRASIL code it wants to obtain. This either means specifications of YGGDRASIL were leaked beyond the awareness of the alphabet soup, or another party has reverse-engineered enough of YGGDRASILs internals to ascertain important code segments and name them to Martinez. Analysis in that part is still ongoing.

In my recommendation, we have to begin a serious sweep of our counterintelligence capabilities, especially ONIs TREE ROOT initiative and the SASAs ECHELON WOOD system; frankly Martinez leak points towards what I have to start calling laziness within our intelligence community, and overconfidence that our infosupremacy will deflect enemy penetration attempts. This is obviously not the case anymore, and unacceptable. Leaks of our ASI architecture, especially TITAN or WARMIND, and of YGGDRASIL would place the SA and the SAAF at strategic weaknesses and in the case of war, disadvantages, we would need years if not decades to correct, and would ensure the loss of one of our greatest force multipliers.

With that said, the attached master file where we compressed the events until now, and SI actions post-Data denial operation.

Itaki Reindorf

Senior Operations Supervisor

[ 1 Attached File: 2232_03_29_SICase_988445112-BRTEEV-0065412567_Master_ ]

[ ▼ 2232_03_29_SICase_988445112-BRTEEV-0065412567_Master_ ▼ ]

* * *

/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\  
THIS IS A DEEP EYES SAPIENT RED FILE  
YOUR ACCESS ATTEMPT HAS BEEN LOGGED  
AUTHENTICATING USER ID... [ ACCEPTED ]  
DISARMING ICE AND MEMETIC PAYLOADS... [ DONE ]  
DECRRYING FILE... [ DONE ]  
/\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

* * *

 **SYSTEM ALLIANCE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE AGENCY**  
 **INTERNAL SECURITY DIVISION**

 **CASE #988445112-BRTEEV-0065412567  
Attempted Information Leak from OMIS by OMIS High Official Juan Carlo Martinez**

* * *

 **Master Case and Operations File**

* * *

 **Glossary of Terms**

* * *

 _ **Bodyloss** : The loss of an Egos Shell due to heavy damage, potentially including loss of Ego Execution capability._  
 _ **Codelines** : AI-specific executive code and associated data files. Can refer to both the entire general executive code and code architecture of one AI series (such as the Type 552 AI of a Kamachida Household Android) or the executive code and data of a singular specific AI. (A/N: TachikomaAIOS_v2.065.1_Tachikoma-0056_cdl_ is one example of an AI-specific Codeline)_  
 _ **Echelon Trust Rating** : The Echelon Trust Rating is a "trigger sensitivity" for internal surveillance systems and projects like DEEP SENTINEL. It decides when a person is marked for review, surveillance, or other actions_  
 _ **Ego** : The wholesome complex neuronal and/or information landscape of a person, including the Ghost. AGIs and ASIs possess an Ego as well, though of a different format than (trans)humans that run on a Homo Sapiens neuroarchitecture._  
 _ **Ego Execution Capability** : Egos require an executive medium to run; the ability of a medium, whether it may be a brain, augmented brain, or artificial brain, to execute an Ego is referred to as Ego Execution Capability. Loss of EEC means the Ego is frozen as static data, potentially in a back-up system, or has been lost._  
 _ **Ghost** : The core of the Ego, the Ghost are identifying aspects and information clusters that make a person a person and unique; it can also be seen as the "soul". Whereas other aspects of the Ego can be altered without major consequences, alterations to the Ghost carry major personality and behavior changes and can indeed be used to override one person with another, more desired one._  
 _ **Instance-kill** : An instance kill, in contrast with a bodyloss, means that the instance state of a particular Ego was irreversibly lost. For an Ego without backups, Instance-kill means real death, with no possibility to create a new instance of the Ego._  
 _ **ONI** : Office of Naval Intelligence - The System Alliance Space Force-specific Intelligence Agency._  
 _ **RISS** : Resleeve Identity Stress Syndrome - A psychological condition that Egos initiated from Backup can often experience after their previous Instance has died with loss of the Ego. Common symptoms are feelings or sentiments of "being just a clone of the original" and "not being oneself"._  
 _ **Psychosurgery** : Special "surgery" conducted on the Ego or, if necessary, the Ghost, with the goal of changing parts of either from an undesired into a desired shape. Psychosurgery can be used to remove (or add) psychological conditions, add compulsory triggers, add or remove skills or memories especially when associated with the Ghost, or perform deep-intrusion memory and personality alterations. Differs from a Ghosthack insofar as that Psychosurgery can also only influence the Ego, and is in any way conducted less in a subversive manner. Can also be seen as consensual ghosthacking._  
 _ **Resleeving** : The act of transmitting an Ego from static data storage onto an Ego-executive medium._  
 _ **SASA** : System Alliance Security Agency - Intelligence Agency responsible for communication interception, analysis, and network-based intelligence_  
 _ **(Cortical) Stack** : A reinforced Ego Storage system that creates a continuous backup of the Ego. If Ego Execution capability is lost or a person suffers bodiless any other way, the Stack enables a secure backup of the last Egostate to be retrieved and resleeved in a new Shell. Destruction of the Stack means, in lack of any other Shell-side Ego storage systems, an Instance-kill._  
 _ **Simulspace** : "Simulated Space" - An Ego-hosting Virtual Reality environment. Contrast with Virs (Virtual Reality.)_  
 _ **PDS** : Personal Digital Sphere - The whole of a person's individual data and software, attached to that person._

 _ **DEEP SENTINEL** : Counter Penetration Surveillance AI system that monitors System Alliance personnel for enemy intelligence penetration_  
 _ **ECHELON WOOD** : SASA system for monitoring Extranet traffic_  
 _ **TREE ROOT** : ONI Initiative to monitor extranet traffic at the borders of human space._  
 _ **YGGDRASIL** : Codename for the AIs and communication, server and networking architectures that merge all aspects of the System Alliance communication, networking and information infrastructure from government over intelligence to the military into the System Alliance Information Network._

* * *

 **Case History - Recent timeframe**

* * *

On the eve of March 20th, OMIS-assigned DEEP SENTINEL AIs registered a major behavior and biometrics deviation on Commodore Juan Carlo Martinez, sufficiently to trigger the Echelon Trust Override and alarm SI to a possible breach. Subsequently, DEEP SENTINEL switched Martinez status to Surveilled, and documented as Martinez transferred unknown data from an external OMIS-issue 500-Tb storage device into his PAN using a hardwired connection. Subsequently, the IS was alerted to a likely data security breach in progress, as Martinez had logged no such activity beforehand.

SAMIA SI Counterintelligence Division 6 Team 45 was alarmed and tasked with ascertaining the nature of the breach, as Martinez left OMIS HQ and returned to his home, scheduled to depart for Earth the next day via an interplanetary shuttle departing from the New Armstrong spaceport for Singapore Highport. Martinez was supposed to spend a night at Singapore Groundport before departing via Hypersonic to Japan for a meeting with Kenbishi Heavy Industries and Bostom-Akamashu Japan officials, talking about the introduction of a new series of AI into SAAF service.

At 0855 Hours March 21st, S6T45 officially reported that Martinez had accessed the OMIS Codeline stores, and used his credentials to authorize a codeline download for OMIS-stored ASI software from the DEEP MIND 4 archives; at 1122 Hours it was certain Martinez had transfered 56 terabytes of ASI codelines, including parts of the TITAN network and the System Alliance Information Network YGGDRASIL Backbone, as well as operations logs to his external storage device and then into his PAN. This activity was not discovered earlier because Martinez had released a sophisticated Counter-Intrusion Detection program into the DEEP MIND 4 servers, which covered and erased his traces; remaining early-warning points did not trigger warnings due to the Echelon Trust rating of Martinez.

Subsequently, Internal Security Leadership was alerted to a high-profile security breach in progress; political deliberations delayed a quick response however, and Martinez departed from New Armstrong spaceport without intervention by IS units. Section 6 forces at Singapore groundport were alerted to a potential intelligence breach and prepared to engage.

At 1430 Hours, IS teams scrutinizing Martinez home on Luna and his digital sphere discovered an enemy program that will be elaborated on further; Martinez contact was ID'ed as Hendal Wim, possible STG-affiliate, officially with the Citadel Economic Development Foundation in Malaysia as a Citadel Alliance Representative. Subsequently, the breach rating was updated, and Internal Security leadership briefed at 1550 Hours.

At 1810 Hours Director of Counterintelligence Operations Taimei Kubota called in external assistance after deliberation with the IS council, requesting an external IS-unaffiliated Black Ops Force to neutralize Martinez.

This neutralisation took place on the following day, March 22nd 2232, at 1856 Hours local time in the Penthouse suite 0632 of the Singapore Groundport Hilton Megaplex Tower 4. Martinez and Wim were both, together with three guards Wim had brought to the location, instance-killed, with loss of stack in all five instances via total destruction of the cranial cases followed by a nanothermobatic explosive used to destroy bodies and carried storage devices. The Black Ops force subsequently exfiltrated without issues, and Section 6 units moved in to assess the situation and secure the now-crime scene. At 2032 hours, IS units arrived on-site from the Los Angeles division to take over the site from Section 6 and SGPD.

* * *

 **Post-Incident IS review of Subject Commodore Juan Carlo Martinez**

* * *

Martinez Ego present at Singapore Groundport was instance-killed, with total loss of the Ego. As soon as total bodyloss and destruction of the Ego was officialy confirmed by police authorities, the Office of military Medicine and Augmentations was contacted and the pull of Martinez back-up, updated on the night from the 19th to the 20th of March 2232, was requested for post-incident interviews as per standard IS policy. During this interview done in Simulspace on March 23rd, Martinez did not disclose any dealings and indicated major distress at the thoughts of being "just a copy" and "the real Martinez having died", showing major Post-resleeve distress and Resleeve Identity Stress Syndrome. After the interview which was conducted with some difficulty and cut short on medical concerns, he was transferred, on consent, for medical psychosurgery to help with stress relief.

However, before being subject to Psychosurgery, Martinez ego was again sleeved in a Simulspace environment and subjected to more thorough interrogation by IS personnel; he was confronted with the actions of his other instance and asked how and when he had been contacted by whom. At first, Martinez made clean denials, but gave IS psychosurgeons enough neural activity pointers to subsequently extract and confront Martinez with a relationship with an unknown, potentially STG-affiliated party for the past 2 years, based on incriminating information the other party threatened to release into the wider public, killing Martinez carrier and his position at the OMIS. The alternative was for him to hand over information to the party; at first irrelevant reports but soon followed by more important information, including AI codelines.

The backup of Martinez was, however, definitely and confirmed not aware of his other instances actions during the 21st and 22nd of March. In conclusion, Martinez neutralized instance was only commanded to retrieve the information destroyed on the 22nd on the 21st of March; fitting with his actions triggering DEEP SENTINEL. Martinez was most likely aware that he would trigger DEEP SENTINEL or other overwatch routines, but apparently saw no alternative.

After this second interrogation session, Martinez was transferred to psychosurgery and treated for RISS; furthermore Ghost editing was performed and Guild Locks inserted to neutralize Martinez awareness of his past actions and the honey pot that had been used to pressure him. This should ensure a solid integrity going forward, though Martinez will remain under IS watch for the year going forward, pending future evaluation of his status.

A new Shell for Martinez is provided at this time, and he will return to active duty with the OMIS only a few days from now.

* * *

 **Martinez home and digital sphere**

* * *

While Martinez home and personal digital sphere was already subject to preliminary review during the events of the 21st and 22nd of March, the analysis of the hostile software took several days, in part due to counter-analysis measures and the heavy encryption.

The software was a special contact and communications software installed directly into the OS of Martinez home system and his primary terminals. Based on digital forensics, the software was uploaded there by a digital intrusion delivered via a regular OS update two years ago. The intrusion was definitely guided and not conducted by an independent attack program; Martinez update was intercepted and altered in transit. The exact means are still under investigation.

Once installed, the program nested itself deep within the OS architecture and established several encrypted ports into the human Extranet; it received periodic instructions through some of these ports. After an "incubation" period, the program activated for a first time a month after insertion on April of 2230, confronting Martinez with the evidence and recruiting him for the unknown party; during this time Port 02 was active, transmitting to and from a Virverse server.

Over the subsequent months the program became active whenever Martinez was contacted by the unknown party; the software kept parts of the old messages in storage, interestingly, buffering them for potential replay under heavy encryption. Why this decision was made is unknown but pointers are that the messages were split and buffered inside the software over weeks, seeking to bypass security measures with miniscule, seemingly unrelated data packages send to Martinez. Thanks to this, we were able to retrieve parts of the messages, and document two security breaches of significance - Once a Synthetic Insights AGI program of the ATTS-9800 series, an another time a Battlefield Control Software package used for the mass control and coordination of robotic infantry.

Detailed analysis of the software reveals a surprising mixture of code from all over Citadel space; large amounts of the software were batarian coding associated with the SIU and the Black Guard, including past penetration attempts. Only parts of the code were definitive STG packages; including the encryption and stealth software used to hide the software inside Martinez OS. As such, the responsible party cannot be identified per the code and programming style; we could not identify any STG programming teams in this software, unlike in other cases.

* * *

 **Nature of the hostile party**

* * *

The nature of the hostile party that caused the Martinez breach is unknown; while the depth of the penetration and the involvement might point towards the STG, the nature of the breach, the data leaked by Martinez and the message style do not support this conclusion. The Shadow Broker network, the Batarian Hegemony intelligence community or one of the larger hacker networks could also be responsible. Investigating Wims background and affiliation might yield deeper answers to this question, but as of this time IS cannot ascertain the hostile party.

Nonetheless we recommend that investigation into this case continue and are branched out to the AIS for deeper investigation in Citadel space. Reactions by the STG going forward may also supply clues as to the nature of the party.

 **[\\\log_out]  
[\\\access_terminate]**

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** A little non-optional Interlude more heavy on the worldbuilding before it goes into Chapter 1, looking a bit more into what happened around the events of the Prologue on the side of the MIAs Internal Security division.

 **A/N:(Nick):** Question for readers: Want a chapter for Codex Entries here or a dedicated documents?


	5. Intel Pt 1

_2 Months later…_

* * *

She laid back into the interface chair, settling arms and legs on the comfortable rests, then positioned head and spine properly against the laser interface port.

The outside world vanished, and she dropped backwards away from reality.

50 meters above a walkway of several ways and a complex installation of statues, plant beds, and water installations, Motoko Kusanagi's Avatar materialized into the Virverse, and gently dropped to the ground.

She oriented herself. She had dropped exactly where she'd specified; some ten minute's walk from Kameraishai Core and New Stygis Park, where her contact had indicated the connection point.

Around her, avatars and aerial vehicles flew through the sky with nary a sound; Skywalks bent through the sky on bridges and loops, weaving through the network of trees which bore leaves in a dozen colours and a manifold of stems.. Birds were trilling through the trees, and music was intermingling from some 100 meters beyond into the treeline of the park the massive walkway looped around.

The skyline was a mixture of the conventional, exotic and nominally absurd; one building made of three towers corkscrewed around a common center presented free-floating elevators that spat in the face of the laws of physics; another building in the distance was a lotus flower-esque design that had been, in a perfect demonstration of the laws of this world, flipped upside-down, with the petals holding up a bulbous receptacle and seed body of colorful glass in the air.

Roads were nowhere to be seen. Virtual Reality had no need for the rules of logistics or the expense of skyborne travel; a vision real worlds could never throw off had become easy reality over 200 years ago, when Peer-to-Peer VR had exploded in between better and better VR gear, cloud-based hosting and computing, and the first implants.

Today, the massive expanses of the Virverse were part of humanity's inner frontier - an ever-growing and ever-permutating galaxy of thousands of alien worlds, sometimes modelled after reality, other times created in ways even the modern universe did not permit or had shown to transhuman eyes.

By these standards, Kameraisha City was pretty down to earth; hosted in a server inside an asteroid in the Arcturus primary asteroid belt, the massive virtual city and its manifold surrounding areas served as one of several virtual meeting hubs, a virtual community that mirrored the real one.

The Virverse and its various components of hosting and virtual reality systems (the Second Life system that had been part of the early Virverse was only part of many software kits that had been written and modified over the years) served many purposes; living fantasy lives together with other people, working on purposefully controlled and shaped environments where the desired co-worker's office was always just a walk out the door and into the next down the shifting corridors, immersing oneself in one of the manifold game worlds to play with friends or strangers, and building and exploring alien worlds - and alien lives.

In sharp contrast to the real world, the amount of alien-modelled Avatars and derivatives exploded inside the Virverse. While more than one transhuman afforded him/her/zerself an alien-modelled Shell with as much bionic replication as possible if they could afford the money, changing it took time, effort and special installations or demanded remote control; an aspect not always acceptable in a world where information control often involved simply not permitting the flow of information in the first place.

But inside a virtual reality where gravity, shape and color and associated Body Image modules were just more code and variables that could be executed as desired, changing an Avatar took seconds, if even that, and prices were only in the hundreds of credits instead of ten thousands of credits for a real-world shell. One could experiment.

As such, Kusanagi passed more than one turian, asari, salarian, quarian (a few Avatars without Envirosuits), several volus, quite a lot of hanar avatars (many of them with other colors or exotic clothing), drell, and various avatars derived of the base template. More than one Asari avatar had been designed to follow a more elvish template, others sported hair in a variety of templates. The clothing was an eclectic mix of human and alien designs. Several alien fashion designers and clothing chains made good money selling Avatar clothing.

Kusanagi's own Avatar today was pretty conservative by these standards; it was humanoid and human-standard, an asian-featured female elf with a conservative costume of woven colored wool threads over a black bodysuit that exposed the right shoulder, surrounded by a few strips of floating clothing stripes and ornaments of a silver-ish material. Her Shell's trademark violet hair was now a fierce red partially woven around the pointed ears and down the back in a small ponytail, otherwise falling just below the shoulders.

When she arrived at New Stygis Park, some large event was going on inside the park proper; a large crowd of Avatars had gathered down at the central plazza, well visible from the "west" entrance of the park. She stepped through the entrance gate, a stylish black arc in 60 degree angles modelled after the scanner gates as they lined public places, and into the park proper. The invitation for an "open-vir concert" popped into her vision immediately, white text and colorful graphics against a dark grey window that hovered some 10 centimeters of the ground, advertising a live Virstream by The Void Tones with their new album.

She hesitated. Back then and in here she activated analysis implants, jacked up her perception as far as she could.

 _I have to blend in. Don't draw attention to myself.  
Cannot attend either. Meeting window is in 15 minutes RLT. Options?_

Virtual eyes flickered up and down the option list of the invitation, welcomingly fast without the restrictions of physical eyeballs and factually infinitely fast rendering times.

* * *

[ Follow Livestream for later Use ]

[ Send a Beta/ReprAIsentive ]

* * *

 _Good. That should be sufficient cover._

Her implants chimed an affirmative; the Anonymizer AI that evaluated and regulated her gait and behavior in the background found the move sufficiently fitting to her public character at the moment.

The world snapped back to regular speed. As she walked, her right hand extended, stretching out towards her desired options, which highlighted and expanded towards her. She swiped it to the right, and the invitation exploded into animations, thanking her for showing interest, transferring Bonus and Loyalty points from several groups, the band only one among them, several tracks of the new and past albums in full length, rabats for purchases, all packed into a nice animation. At the very end was the slot for her Beta.

She forked off the Beta on the go; the second her manifesting in a complex particle animation as a Section 9 Egoserver took the Beta generated by her implants and a secondary pruning LAI for temporary hosting and connected with the Kameraishai Core Virserver.

The other Motoko Kusanagi was different; her arms and shoulders were more exposed, the trousers cut shorter, to expose complex tattoos of quasi-circuitry, alive under the skin. Trailing cloth ribbons and a right-sided half-skirt joined the outer clothing. The two skintight bracelets around the wrists were the other indicator. She nodded to her Beta, and they parted ways, the other Kusanagi throwing on a bright smile as he descended the stairs, joining groups of other Avatars. A second later, she was engaged in discussion, Kusanagi-Main keeping some attention focused on her other self's activity as she pulled information about The Void Tones from the Net and let an LAI compile the info into knowledge for NIKB integration.

Kusanagi returned her focus to the meeting up ahead. Her contact had given her a code she had already inserted into a primed software package whose Virshell she now carried in one invisible pocket on her Avatar. It was an old trick that still worked. Technically, the software was a door.

But doors, inside something like a Vir, could be many things.

The modern Virverse had grown out of the few, then dozens of virtual reality worlds human programmers and game developers had started building during the 2020s and forward. These systems, especially the more open ones, quickly escalated from more centralized hosting solutions into decentralized peer-to-peer networks where dozens of geologically separated storage and computing solutions flowed together into one singular reality, at least to the user's eye. One server system housed the massive then-transitioning to Quantum Computers Physical simulation servers; others hosted massive soundfiles and -generators that populated the world with immersive sound.

The virtual servers themselves were linked together in various ways. The advent of the interplanetary age fragmented the early Virverse, before tightbeam FTL communications slammed it back together far more tightly than ever imagined. Latencies dropped dramatically, and Comm Buoys became a massive gold rush, an age when the highly complex devices could not be built fast enough.

Such complex peer-to-peer networking necessitated massive amounts of interserver connection and data exchange protocols, bringing the many subcomponents from all the servers together into a coherent whole. As such, it was surprisingly easy to hide communications between two servers inside the massive weave of connections even Artificial Super Intelligences could not cut through very fast; an issue exacerbated by the enormous data hierarchy and sheer mass of data generated inside the Virverse.

As controllable as this reality was, centrally supervising it was a nightmare. Those with enough resources could manage - somewhat.

But a terrorist network her informant was close to? Very slim chance, especially if done right.

What Kusanagi's contact had handed her was a one-time key that would literally just open a door. But inside the code of the modern Virverse, a door could literally teleport you from one server to the next, a portal through virtual space-time. The connections were complex and, when one jumped enough servers from the "insertion" to the "meeting" server, the connection was, as with the Tor network of the early 21st century, not traceable between either party.

To the supervising systems or any snoopers hostile parties might have had inside the server, the action would literally be just that - a door. One of ten thousands that opened and closed, spawned and de-spawned around the server every minute. A single deviation, lost in the mass of other regular activities. Indeed, "doors" as programmed objects were common code used in so many software pieces that it was impossible to cut through the mass of traffic by anyone but SA-operated ASIs.

She reached the agreed-upon meeting spot, and retrieved the key from her pocket. Then she scanned the area. Her contact would have dropped the other part of the meeting protocol somewhere, spawned as a tiny creature entity that distributed widely over an area. But only the one in this area would, though a combination of its server-internal geocoding and her own key, open the server connection.

The agreed-upon entity was easily identified among the other fliers. The bird stood out among the flock that was pecking and singing on the floor of the now-empty park space, a colorful thing with four wings and a complex four-part "beak" in front of just as many eyes and two sets of nose-like slits, a xenoflier that was partially modelled after one of the exotic biospheres discovered somewhere around Sol or Arcturus before having undergone a design regression and suffering from a bad case of terrestrially-sourced colorful feathers.

When she approached, the bird did not scare; none of the fliers that populated the square did. It had a much different reaction when she presented the underside of the access program cube to it, staring at it for a second as an Imrec algorithm analysed the QR code "printed on" there.

It tilted its head left. Then right.

Then it lowered its head, and the feathers shimmered in a complex pattern for just a second. The other part of the access code, encrypted in color information from a number-derived base pattern that was keyed to the meeting time.

The access key warmed ever so slightly in her hand. The signal that it was ready. No fanfare, just a simple variable change, one tiny modification in a massive set that drove the physics simulation of this Vir server.

She pressed the key firmly, and from second to the next her Avatar dropped through darkness.

* * *

 **= Chapter 1 - "Intel" =**  
 **-| May 16th, 2232 |**

* * *

The first face Togusa saw every morning when he arrived at work was that of Officer Murphy, at the Section 9 Employe Air garage security checkpoint.

"Morning Mr. Togusa", Murphy said, his voice coming perfectly over the hidden loudspeakers as Togusa stepped into the security airlock. Togusa allowed himself to be "dusted off" by the air currents and the nanomachines hidden within, all while two heavy scanner rings moved up and down to subject his body's innards to an equally thorough inspection. A group of four security droids, black figures mantled by surprisingly colorful uniforms, watched the procedure from both ends of the airlock.

"Morning Murphy", Togusa greeted back as he stepped out of the airlock and set his suit and tie.

Now that they were inside the sealed area of the building, Togusa could drop the rather strict rules in place when it came to talking about private matters in public places. "The kids are doing okay?".

"Yeah. My first is moving to Nouveau Paris soon, to the academy you recommended. Wants to study Biomechatronics, always talks for hours each evening about Biomimetics and augmentations and cyborg shells…" Murphy's eyeswere drifting off into the distance, a warm smile on his face. "How are yours?"

"Kat's on the Askatis Academy for about a month now, she's lived in. Still gets some weird looks she says, but the ice is melting and she's finding friends, fast. Being a human is obviously 'super awesome' with the asari, and well… being able to stand up to the occasional bully and have no scratches the next day builds a reputation."

Murphy hummed. "You visiting them any time soon?"

"Hadn't had a chance", Togusa said ruefully. "Way too many Ops, too much office work. It's that time of year again."

"And I'd wager that bomb blast on… Ishikawera Station?... Didn't help."

Togusa grimaced. "Nope. Big Press all around, two real deaths, over forty body losses and three instance-kills… and god knows how many repairs. Nanomotile aerosol explosives distributed via a hacked ventilation system are nasty." He tried banning the images of the site from his mind, but both the investigation and the news media had plastered the image into his field of vision for days. Not to mention the fact that many were talking about it, internally and externally.

Awkward silence for a moment. "Sorry."

"What, no, it's quite okay. See you later, Murphy."

"Have a nice day, Mr. Togusa."

Togusa waved as he stepped through the glass sliding doors and into the elevator hub; one open door was already waiting for him, helpfully indicated on his ARO by his muse Diana. He stepped inside. The doors closed, and the elevator automatically departed for the Operation Teams Office level.

* * *

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* * *

 **PUBLIC SECURITY SECTION 9 INTERNAL NETWORK / WIKI AND FORUM**

 **BRIEFING DOCUMENTS AND OVERVIEW FILES**

* * *

 **General Infocrime and Cyberterrorism Threats of the 2230s - An overview for Newcomers**  
 _Senior Threat Analytics Operator Joan DeLance_  
 _Threat Analytics AI Supervisor Carol Fields_

This document was written by the Threat Tracking and Analysis division specifically for the newer members who have just joined Section 9. Human space is massive, and compared to what our community had to deal with one or two centuries ago, today the enormous size of human territory and society, with the additional factor of a galactic community, have increased the sheer scope of threats we need to monitor and assess. Furthermore, the colonial expansion has severely degraded former intelligence assets and surveillance capabilities our agencies had access to during the more contained early 21st century, meaning we are once again far more dependant on proactive, infiltrating surveillance than simple signal interception and analysis.

First up, a dose of realism. I know we all like to think (and are encouraged in this perception by the media) that humanity is now one big, unified family.

We're not. Boy, not by a long shot. Under the shiny surface, humanity is one big pressure cooker of issues and conflict.

Not that the alien civilisations are much better. Those here who have read up on the turian separatists or the civil wars and skirmishes that boil in the Asari Republics might already be aware, for the rest of you, yperlink's right there for a later read.

So we aren't unique or "more disorderly" with our issues, no matter the high horses many people like to ride on in public. (Yes, I am looking at the Asari. 'Peaceful and wise' my ass. Talk about that once you don't have civil wars that brew for centuries.)

The threats that concern Section 9 specifically can be divided in two major fields: self-interest, and ideological. Self-interest is predominantly criminal, and interested in their own (economic or otherwise) gain. That includes the majority of Ghosthacks, Identity Hijackings, and general capital infocrime we deal in, **but** : not all of it. _Remember that_.

Ideological threats are, as the category says, ideologically motivated. Religious, political, pro- and contra-augmentation (and yes, those radical yokels remain though at this point they're largely a joke), aggressive xeno-preservation and environmentalism... and the list goes on. This is lots of the likes of vandalism infocrime… hijacking of ARONets, trigraphic projection arrays and holodisplays, hacked drones and VandalBots, the occasional Kaos AI.

But, what becomes far more serious, there are physical attacks, especially from the more action-ready parties. The religious and independence groups are the predominant threats here, but criminal hit squads and Shadowrunners are also on the list. Still, these groups like infocrimes as well, both for cover, chaos, and to spread their messages. Shotgun messages are one of the common infocrimes from that side we'll deal with, besides life support hacks or infrastructure subversions, especially on the political front. Nanosocialists also like to do high-profile DRM hacks, R&D theft, and take over production and distribution infrastructure, commonly with disruptive goals. Thankfully they're not stupid enough to touch basic or spaceborne logistics, because then we would have to drop the hammer on them.

A special mention should be made of the religious and independence factions, mostly because they are the high-profile threats. Religious extremism and terrorism has essentially been with us since forever. The reason you don't hear much about it these days is in part that the public has become apathetic to it and that these radical idiots can't deal as much lasting damage anymore as they used to (hard to really kill people in an age of stacks and backups), while also suffering from a crumbling follower base and having to face better and better countermeasures. The new TITAN systems and PYTHIA especially have been very helpful in that regard, and predictive systems are advancing every year, slowly outpacing their Anonymizers and other countermeasures.  
When they do manage to make something stick however, then is when shit hits the fan. They also like to cause ruckus in the colonies, mostly because our surveillance isn't as well established as there as in the Core, and because separated religious "sanctuary" colonies are much more widespread there. (The incident at Haris in 2205 was just one nasty example.) One good news is that almost all of the radical nutters reject uploading and backups, so once they've killed themselves in some stint, they're gone for good and we don't have to worry about resleeves.

As for the Independents - Their big time is factually over. The Outer Fringe War and the prelude was their 15 minutes of fame. They've resorted to harassment ever since. We know they are trying to consolidate, to rally and get more resources by building up presences in the Verge and fringe systems, and First Contact has helped them they're a lot, but up front they don't conduct many operations anymore.

 **But** , do not mistake that silence for the absence of danger. The likes of the OFF and the ACI have still access to quite the firepower, our own arsenal is a testimony to that. Yes, these days such terrorists can throw around firepower equivalent to the Force Recon tank division on the bases they construct on some rock in a system at the ass end of nowhere. You have modern nanotech and fabbers to thank for that, and the access to more Citadel military gear in the Verge has only exacerbated that trend. It might not be cutting-edge, but even the somewhat older stuff packs a punch, and even the by now outdated Citadel models can match our equipment in more than one category. So our strategy comes down to hunt and terminate, destroying their gear, their bases of operation and slowly grinding them down. That might not be immediately satisfying or flashy, but it gets results that stick.

Right. After those words of encouragement, let's get into the juicy details.

Let's start by talking about [...]

* * *

[~~~~~~~~~~]

* * *

 ** _COMMENTS:_**

DeLance, this document really needs some work. I know you like to be blunt but this really can't stand as is.

Suggest this be reworked and cleaned up.

[ + 165 Agree ]  
[ + 21 Disagree ]

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

 **A/N:** And finally it goes on into the story proper.


	6. Intel Pt 2

The space around Kusanagi's avatar was a white-glowing black, a placeholder world. In front of her, the server connection jumped from one node to the next as she patiently waited for the rerouting to complete.

Her tracing software had by now predictably lost track of where exactly she was connecting to, and she had shut down the automated trace immediately after. No need to spook her contact with snooping from her side. The last trace had jumped straight from the spinward rim over the Russian pass back into trailward space; then she had lost the trace.

Still, the software had made two rapid jumps through a net of core and spinward first shell servers without hiccups; the coders were definitely improving their ability to keep track of Virverse server jumping.

She watched the clock in her third eye, resting center among the visual data projected there. She was one minute over meeting time, and her contact had not connected yet. She checked the server feed. Yes, she definitely was connected. There had been a successful, if anonymized, connection confirmation.

"Ken, if you cut out on me now…" she said into the white darkness of the Loading Virspace.

As if on que, Vir elements snapped into place. The connection was slow-buffering, and the elements loading were surprisingly simple - A barebones, minimalistic upgrade to the Loading Vir, rendered in some retro-futuristic style of colorful lines over reflective white and black with a few mate accents. The sky was a heaving, waving mass of violet, blue and white dots that mirrored in the floor below, the light illuminating everything without a clear source beyond "above". A classical low-bandwidth Virs that used lots of mathematics and simplistic libraries to fill its space with details and the required resolutions of a Virs.

Her contact was nowhere to be seen.

 _Non-standard. He was already here. Should have already been here._

* * *

[ Evaluating Options…. ]

/Trawling past contacts and behavior patterns

/Analysing Contact Behavior Data

/Searching All-Locations Info feeds for Possible Influencing Events

/First Generation Analysis commencing; seeding Analysis entities.

/First Generation Analysis finished.

/Commencing Second Generation Analysis.

/Finished. Trawling Generation Data, culling Generation systems, generating Third.

/Commencing Third Generation Analysis.

/Finished.

/Final Analysis...

[ Check for encrypted messages ]

* * *

Her hand produced another Virshell out of seemingly thin air, pulling the item from the invisible pocket and spawning it into the server world; little AROWs reported a sucessfull upload and integration.

The egg hatched, and a tiny hummingbird emerged in sparkles of digital tessellated sparks of blue and violet, it's feathers a wonderful mix of colors. Its breast and keel were a shimmering blue and green, its tail feathers a brilliant orange on the underside and streaks of red and violet on the upper side, its wings and beak a brilliant vibrant light violet edging into indigo.

The hummingbird bot took flight with a low-frequency hum, and immediately began exploring the virtual world of the meeting space, seemingly jolting from place to place as its head and eyes methodically trawled the world for any hidden keys, routines searching for the encrypted plantlets of hidden-away data caches.

It returned without having done anything else.

Nothing.

Frustration and anger began swelling for a whole two seconds before Kusanagi jacked up the thresholds on her suppressor implants and half-forced, half-willed herself to become calm again. It was not like Ken Silversky was a subordinate of hers and he could very well have encountered problems on his end.

If anything, anger was misplaced entirely. Worry was both more logical and more justified. SILVER THROAT was a good source, one Section 9 had only acquired with great difficulty. Losing him would mean a massive setback for Section 9's Surveillance and Threat Imaging capabilities, and that was not something they could afford. Every early warning sign, no matter how faint, could mean another attack stopped. With the recent surge in successful attacks, people were starting to ask questions and enemy parties became emboldened.

Neither was optimal for Section 9's operations. And as the de-facto Second-in-Command of Section 9, and Commander of Section 9's most effective cluster, she would be in the spotlight as much as Aramaki.

Neural activity once again kindled in the emotions center.

A virtual hand reached out and thumped the suppressors up another notch.

Commonly, one would now rest his hands on his hips. She did.

Still nothing. The universe seemed to want to taunt her today.

So she waited, milliseconds and seconds ticking off the connectivity clock, and virtual fingers reached out to prod Analysis Servers sideralside. Something must have gone wrong.

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

"Hey there!"

Togusa looked up from his panoramic holoscreen and spotted Batou, in grey t-shirt and dark blue jeans, leaning in the doorframe, a friendly smile on his face. Both his hands casually rested in the jean's pockets, and overall Batou projected an aura of relaxed happiness.

"Morning, big guy", Togusa said with a smirk. "So, what has you so cheerful this morning?" He raised a demonstrative inquisitive eyebrow: "Gabriel?" His eyes dropped to Batou's shoes. They were solid military boots in khaki-olive, as worn with military field uniforms that weren't field-used hardsuits, with a slight air of wear and tear surrounding them.

Batou generally wore a pair of comfortable american sneakers he sometimes kicked about in his office to only wear (odorless as his legs were artificial and had neither sweat, body odor or anything else to worry about) socks.

"What gave it away?" Batou asked and dropped into one of Togusa's leather chairs with a bang as 300 kilos of cyborg shell slammed into nano-padded leather.

Togusa cracked a smile and dismissed his work with a wave of the hand, switching the screen to transparent so he could see Batou better from the position of his own chair behind the heavy desk.

"So, want can I do for you?", Togusa asked as he produced his coffee cup from the thermal holder.

"How would you move about… say, three dozen Shells with milspec gear, assault weapons for one organic platoon and two robotic battalions with 300 units each from coreward to spinward?"

"The Telorado case?" Togusa asked for clarification.

Batou nodded. "Yeah. I looked at their profile, and the military gear they had definitely came from spinward. Lots of old Chinese and European stuff, French mechs and German infantry and power armor weaponry, Polish explosives, several Chinese pulse lasers, the kind of stuff. This gear you only get in the spinward parts easily, but the big question is how they shipped it."

Togusa blew up his cheeks and rotated his chair, staring at the ceiling for a moment. "Depends on where they'd start shipping the big stuff. Factually, all of that fits into a 600-meter freighter, easily. You can even hide it inside the vacuum bulk, so inspection can't open it even if they wanted to; you only need a good excuse for such a dense mass profile, and an appropriate delivery to spoof as cover.

"The big trick with interstellar smuggling is upfront, two-fold: hiding it from easy access for inspection and easy scanning. So if you aren't the one to run SysCon to manipulate records and analytis, you take something big that is hard to brush down, where sheer bulk hides what you are carrying. There are some prefered configs. You haul dense slush Helium-3 in the outer tanks, and underneath that you have "radiologically sensitive components", read organic matter, inside sealed containers under nutrient feeds, or "advanced industrial systems" to justify the density and shielding.

"The rest is spoofing mass profile detection. Best way is to find something with similar average density and let some tricky cee-eem work do the fine tuning. A proxy cartel handles the shipping manifest, and with that you get through SysCon without too much a glance."

"But the real issue is from where they shipped?", Batou asked, thoughtful. "You know what, get over to my office. I already have a map where they might have sourced most of this stuff, so let's get to narrowing it down."

"Right." Togusa retrieved his cup, suddenly realizing how light it had become, and followed Batou out the door and into the small communal work island their offices wrapped around.

Batou's own office was straight over on the other side of Togusa's office, both of which were located at the "throat" of the corridor that opened into the central work island.

In many ways, Batou's office was similar to Togusa's. One round curve was dominated by the shimmering concave of a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall holoscreen, a heavy large desk set at the other end, and a small working island for three leather seats around a low table sat in between all of it. A standard-issue desktop screen dominated the table, currently secure and playing a tessellated login screen animation visible on both sides, autumn color waves dancing in the screen in holographic depth.

The biggest difference were the flag stands behind the desk. Togusa's only flags were the flag of the System Alliance, the yellow stars and suns of the six systems on blue of the European Stellar Federation, and the white-on-blue two stars on the beam balance of Starpol.

In contrast, Batou's own office was nearly overflowing with flag stands. The flag of the System Alliance was followed by the flag of the United Interstellar American States; on the other side rested both the flag of the Systems Alliance Army and the 455th Rangers, the fiery Phoenix holding lightning in his claws and beak as he descended with flashing eyes upon the enemy.

Also, Batou had taken to decorating the walls. The two things that always stood out the most were the photos and the awards. Several unit photos had been lovingly framed on paper, showing men and women in uniforms or hardsuits; sometimes standing at attention, otherwise more informally posing with weapons, goofing around, and showing their bright smiles through raised combat visors.

All of it ringed the two Stars of Valor in the center of it all.

Batou headed straight for the large holoscreen, which activated and turned white, opening several windows. A large list with pictures, names and information opened on the left, presenting photorealistic renders of weapons, equipment and combat robots. The main render however was a colorful, 3D-render of spinward human space, the maps north pointing spinward, the dots of systems with their names besides them connected in a network of lines of various styles - One line for FTL, two for Relays, two fat ones for primary relay connections.

"Right." Batou was standing before the map. "That's about as far as I got." He highlighted specific regions of the cluster.

"The energy weapons came from the region around Xin Shanxi. Going by what serial numbers we could recover after someone send a semi-good scrubber swarm over them, they were shifted there after the FCW, roundabout 2205, during the Cold Years. No QR codes to make a hard inventory match, but that's about what forensics could give me and it matches the trend."

Batou swiped from one cluster to the next.

"Now, the Mechs and all… the models and details fit weaponry the ESF threw out of their inventory and deep storages roundabout the same time. 2203 'till 2206. There's a lucrative market in the area for the old sort of stuff, and lots of legit buyers especially on the trailward colonies like the older stuff because it's tried and true, and still hurts while being cheaper.

"Good hotspots for getting stuff like that are systems like New Nottingham or New Rome. You can get lots of the gear legally there, and there are actually several big companies who ship the stuff totally legal for buyers on the trailward frontier."

Togusa thought for a second.

"Okay, that gives us a few pointers. For one, we have two separate regions which are only connected by the The Bridge quickly - So unless this was a long-term job and they made the effort of going through The Log or going all the way around Orion-Cygnus back to their destination… Right, so that leaves two options. Two separate deliveries, or one big delivery. When we caught them, it was one delivery, and they were traversing the Relays trailward. So a loop-around is pretty much unlikely…"

"Unless we only intercepted one shipment", Batou completed the thought.

"Get that logged with Investigations," Togusa advised his Muse. **[ Done. ]** "Back to our routes. As far as we know, and unless they did something iffy in the Core and swapped their IFFs, they were going around. So at least second ring." Togusa traced the Relay route out on the map with a finger, highlighting it.

"Then their best options for letting it all flow together is somewhere here, spinward in the Indian Spin Bulk. New Kolkata has quite the rep for smuggling loads in the outer system. So what are their options from there…?" Togusa selected the system and loaded a Route prediction tool, inserting past known smuggling cases and routes into it. A heatmap layered itself atop of the system connections.

"Okay, that might work. Now, second option. We only really got to them once they were almost around the second ring. Before then we have essentially no records of them. That would mean they obfuscated their signature and switched their IFF around.

"Good way of doing that is running with convoys. It's advantageous to have some tenders run with you and make less tanking stops and static discharge orbits, and in the dense constellation of the convoy you get lost on long-range SysCon imaging and during Relay transfer."

Togusa dropped into one of the leather chairs which had moved up behind him, emptying his coffee mug before dropping it on the table.

"But why use such old gear… and apparently it was bought relatively early on, when the legal market wasn't quite there, right?".

Batou shrugged. "Can't exclude it."

"So what if they are clever and do it in steps... During the 2210s for example we had a big spike in Indian convoys when the rimward colonies received lots of shipping. Including dense farming equipment and stuff like that, and we had a spike in storage drops because there wasn't just enough shipping to shift it all the way around.

"If they were patient," "which would fit their MO," Batou interrupted, "they got all of this early on, and then shifted it bit by bit."

"Until we put the pressure on and they got nervous, and tried retrieving their dead drop cache," Batou concluded.

"And that explains why there aren't any early-on records! They never were further spinward! Clever sons of bitches, those guys. Too bad what we think was their logistics expert got ventilated for good, I would have loved to take the guy apart."

"Thanks." Batou slapped Togusa on the arm and dropped into a chair of his own. "Even if this isn't right, you have me a good pointer. Gonna see if I can stir up some records from the Indian Bulk, see what I find. Intel archives should have some of the Black Market offers."

"You're welcome, big gu…"

The Emergency Mindcom cut into their brains at full power.

 **[** **Everyone, this is the Major. Emergency meeting in 5. Ping the androids and get them packing, EML-6! We are moving immediately!** **]**

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, Chroma."

Kusanagi whirled around. A single avatar had joined the session, an anonymous statue of shifting marble with no true face or features. The voice was an androgynous mix between male and female, though it pitched into the deeper male aspect some 8% heavier.

"Ken, why the delay?"

"Ah, sorry," he said, raising his hands defensively. "The boss has gotten his NetHeads an upgrade. They're much more thorough now, and they've got, like, new software. I had to reprogram my connection on this end, pretend I was heading out over the weekend to friends and family to even make this connection here work."

His voice biometrics spiked. Stressed, slightly fearful, but in here he sounded as though he was speaking truthfully.

"How did he get it?"

"Hell if I know." Ken's avatar began nervously pacing between the white furniture, his face rotating between staring at the floor and looking at her, standing there in mobile. "Something's not right, Chroma. Suddenly we have new gear, new software, we get new cybernetics and all go under the knife, and the Boss is engaged somewhere for hours. He told us an interested party is supporting us, and next I know several of us ship out into the Verge."

"But the, I guess worst part is… the boss has been developing something new. Like, we had lots of more contact spinward, that much I know, and we got several new servers and AI cores something like 3 weeks ago.

"And then, a week ago, I get a new programming job on my desk. Neuroprogramming, really advanced software and API, and they give me sets of instructions to code."

"What kind of instructions?" Ken's behavioral biometrics were spiking too high. Time to cool him down. She approached him, steadfast, and laid two hands on his shoulders. Set a friendly tone of voice, looked him straight in the white marble eyes.

"Ken, I am your friend, okay? You are safe, I will ensure that. Now, calm down, and take a deep breath." She smiled and instructed him to follow her. "Okay?".

His avatar nodded, and he took a deep audible breath. She tweaked her body posture slightly, subliminally suggesting a more friendly atmosphere. KenSilversky's biometrics came back down.

"Right. The Boss has had us developing some kind of new Infowarfare weapon. I think, I belief it involves a Ghosthack, like the instructions I coded certainly looked like they were destined for the payload package of one so far as I know the stuff.

"The thing is, the software looked really advanced. Sleek interface, really good API, and some commands I've never seen in my life. Cutting-edge stuff, like it came straight out of a OMS Luna vault. And that's just not right."

Suddenly he looked at her straight, and suspicion joined the biometrics list as he took a small step back, leaning backwards. "This isn't something by the AIS, is it?"

[ It is? ]

[ No. There is no logged AIS operation and no indications of one on official and your private networks. ]

"No, it isn't."

"Oh, thank god. Thank god." He swiped his face with both hands, then fumbled for non-existing pockets to rest them in.

"So, a Ghosthack?", Kusanagi gently reminded him.

"Yeah. No idea of the details, but last I heard we were packing up. The boss said most of the Cell is being moved somewhere else, but didn't specify. Also, a starship arrived some two days ago, and they've been preparing to shift stuff aboard."

"What are they moving?... Ken, what are they moving?"

"I don't know, okay?!" Stress spiked again. "There's like, compartmentalization, need to know stuff, like that."

"Thanks Ken. I suggest you stay under and out of the line of fire."

"Yeah. Yeah… yeah okay, I will. Still have two days on my family visit anyway." He backed off and stepped back.

She gave him an assured smile. "You did good, okay? What you do is good, and I will that you will be alright."

"Thanks Chroma. ...I guess see 'ya." He logged out.

Kusanagi opened her eyes and stood up from the Interface couch, looking out into the holographic window and the live rainscape of New Kyoto, as captured by a webcam mounted on a building overlooking the skyline of New Newport City.

For a few seconds, she pondered the meeting she just had, and called up a head-in chart of events and the Outer Fringe Independence Brigade they had been monitoring. This was definitely a deviation from events and the timeline predictions they had. The OFIB was, like the ACI and the OFF and the other radical independence fighters, supposed to be a low-key organisation, constantly ground down by the efforts of the SA.

And now, all of a sudden, this happened. A new "sponsor" - A definite deviation.

She trawled her memory and exomemory for known "sponsors" - Some corporations had attempted proxy plays in the past, but this didn't fit. The OFIB was very strong on principle, and this cell especially. Foreign corporations might be culprits, but it also seemed unlikely. That left three possibilities - One of the Terminus or Verge Warlords with enough guts to try to weaken the SA, foreign Intelligence agencies, or the batarians.

What exactly it was was only possible to find out one way - And that was getting their hands on more intel, and stopping whatever new weapon the OFIB had before they could use or ship it.

She keyed her Comms: [ Chief? He have a development on the OFIB Cell 6 case. I want _Hugin_ and _Mugin_ for a field Ops, raiding the cell.]

[Raiding a OFIB cell?] There was silence on the connection. Aramaki was considering now, playing the hypothetical ballgame of to-be political maneuvering out in his head, she knew. [Major, you are aware of the repercussions this will have. The AIS has indicated great interest in developing the intel taps further and getting the hooks on other cells.]

[Yes, Sir. But SILVER THROAT indicated they have a new, potent Infoweapon and some kind of sponsor. In my opinion, Cell 6 is about to turn into an acute problem with a viable threat to System Alliance security and needs addressing, and fast.]

[I trust your judgment Major. Get your team moving, and I will advise Flight you want _Hugin_ and _Mugin_ deployed out. ]

[Thank you Sir. We are moving ASAP.]

[Good luck.] The connection closed.

No time to question her judgement now. She had the green light, a target, and the team to bring that target down. _You will pay._

 **[EMER** **Everyone, this is Major. Emergency meeting in 5. Ping the androids and get them packing, EML-6! We are moving immediately!** **EMER]**


	7. Intel Pt 3

When CEDT-698422 had been cartographed by a UIAS survey mission under System Alliance supervision in 2156, it had not garnered much attention - It was a 600km dwarf planet of surprisingly dense silicates and minerals wrapped in a shell of ice, a supersized Ceres-like dwarf planet which existed surprisingly often wherever human surveyors and explorers had gone, orbiting around a nearby gas giant on a far orbit.

Soon after, the first people moved in to colonize the rock. American settlers from the Belt and outer system mostly, mixed with waves of earth emigrants seeking to make a new live in the wider galaxy. CEDT-698422 becamde Cedatis Station, and it stuck; soon spray-painted all over the surface installations that grew on the surface of the asteroid, and the docking bays embedded into it. The population steadily climbed, rising as humans, bioroids and AGI joined together to tunnel out the rock and build a living infrastructure into it.

Over time, Cedatis Station evolved into a largely unremarkable hub of colonial culture - Offering harbor to hundreds of mining vessels, convergence of mass driver lines that crossed light minutes of space and months of time, and home to about a million people. With most of the traffic and activity going down in the inner system in whose outskirts Cedatis Station and its parent gas giant went on their merry way around the G-class main sequence sun, the station fell largely off the radar of the public, with only the occasional capital freighter running to the station to pick up cargo.

When CSQB/IIS-161 SSV _Huginn_ decelerated into cee-frac cruise around two light minutes from Cedatis Station, its importance for the outer system however was readily apparent. A cloud of 400- to 800-meter contacts was circling the station at a variety of parking orbitals, interspersed with smaller 100-meter shuttles and tugs and a few 1000+ meter superheavy contacts, large mobile asteroid pushers or freighters.

Batou was watching the hybrid sensor fusion of _Huginn's_ forward sensors on his in-head ARO, the 600-kilometer, round dwarf planet a semi-sharp pinhead in the center of the image, surrounded by drive flames and the white slivers of spacecraft, growing larger as _Huginn_ decelerated to hundreds, then only dozens of kilometers per second and closed the distance with the asteroid.

"Infiltration party, stand-by for deployment in T-minus 5 minutes… mark", Operations Supervisor Lian Yu chimed in from _Huginn's_ CIC.

Batou blinked his acknowledgment light and shifted slightly inside the crash couch of the Tachikoma's "pod"; the armored backpack unit containing part of the processing unit, secondary motive systems and some weapons but primarily the armored capsule that housed the human passenger/operator.

Due to the size constraints of the Tachikoma, the crash couch wasn't the most comfortable thing, or so a part of Batou's mind insisted. His cybernetic body could sit with the knees bent, head and torso forward and arms angled at the sides position without getting cramped or limbs getting sleepy; the only thing that could get on your mind was the lack of space to really move, not helped by the acceleration restraint netting that had wrapped itself around torso and limbs.

Batou pitied Togusa; the man was probably feeling far more uncomfortable in his own Tachikoma, despite his Medichines. Even medical nanobots could only do so much about blood vessels being physically pinched.

"You ready?", he asked the Tachikoma, voice contained inside the armored space combat helmet.

"Yes, Mr. Batou!", the cheerful reply came. Batou suppressed the involuntary grin that came to his face. The damn AGI was actually growing on him, despite its demeanor being rather… opposite to military AIs he had worked with in the past. They were either calm to the mechanical, dry-wit serious, or had a warm camaraderie. The "childish" approach to personality design was certainly unique.

"T-Minus 4 minutes. Stand-by rollover execute."

Maneuvering thrusters banged through the hull, the distant thunder of "hot-mode" plasma engines as they expelled superheated xenon into space mixing in with the quiet hum of the fusion engines forcing _Huginn_ into a new vector against its own inertia and millions-ton real mass, forced down by the cee-eem into percentages.

Now _Huginn_ had rolled in a manner so it would present its relative "upper side", as defined by the ship's main gravitics direction, to Cedatis Station once they entered their 100-kilometer parking orbit.

"Infiltration teams, final checks. Stand-by for Airlock evacuation at No-Abort in 30 Seconds, mark."

Batou gave his equipment one last, final electronic check, working his suited Shell as well as he could inside the command couch, and confirming the oxygen feeds to his helmet. They had padded each other down and given themselves a thorough check-up when suiting up, when entering the airlock, and before entering the Tachikoma's pods inside _Huginn's_ spacepool.

But, as Batou had been drilled repeatedly during the Rangers Spaceborne Operations Training, triple-checking everything in person was how you kept your Shell intact in space. It didn't argue with you, it didn't cut deals - If you weren't prepared and relied too much on the AIs to feather you, you could suffer bodyloss - or die for real.

"No Aborts. Evacuating moonpool airlock. Launch window is T-minus 3:20"

On the immersive Synthetic Vision System feed generated by the Tachikoma for its Operator, the external environment indicators began to drop. The already chilly air of the moonpool, cooled down together with the Tachikomas outer hulls for the tense 15-minute Low Thermal Emission Space Operation they were about to conduct, was now sucked out of the room efficiently, sweeping Kiggs fields forcing the air towards the gravitics-assisted pump inlays in the walls.

Now the interior of the spacepool was entirely empty of air; swept as clean as modern technology allowed, and nearly as perfectly empty as the depth of space. Then the lights on the wall and ceiling cut out, and they were plunged into perfect darkness.

Batou glanced at the heatsink readouts and the schematic of the TMS coolant flow. They were ice-cold, the lithium within chilled as cold as it was possible, ready to sap the heat generated by actuators and life support away for precious minutes of low thermal signature. It was tried and tested tech that worked in slipping below detection and identification thresholds, especially around a "hot" target like this one where engine emissions and the heat sapping into the asteroidal rock from the station within created a higher-temperature background to blend into, but it was nerve wracking every time.

With the Rangers, Batou had become used to the indefinite operative capabilities of thermoptic camouflage. The ability to smoothly and always blend into his environment.

Compared to that, stealth in space lacked the air of smoothness and slowness he associated with stealth on the ground. Every move was rehearsed, machine-controlled, timed to precision, and the clock was always counting down, your window always closing with the brutal crushing fist of thermodynamics.

He hated it, and had no problem handing it over to the AIs to execute.

"T-Minus 2 Minutes."

"Do you think we will kill bad people today?", the Tachikoma asked.

"Maybe? Right now you", Batou padded one of the manual control joysticks "are just an Insertion vehicle, but we wouldn't mount guns and launchers onto you if we weren't expecting trouble, now would we?"

"Probably true," the AGI said thoughtfully. Batou shook his head inside the rest.

Then sometimes again, the AGIs could appear really naive, and he wished back the dry wit and expert soldiering of the Eth3N units of his Ranger days.

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

 _Huginn_ had been approaching Cedatis Station under the Q-ship cover, slowly working itself into a parking orbit position from which it could deploy the first infiltration party.

Captain Jonathan "John" Steward had given himself as the grizzled old captain who immediately began working the young belter in Cedatis approach into shape so they got exactly the parking orbit they desired, and had prevailed with bravado.

The LAIs and CASIE had certainly helped with that.

Now they had made their first pass, and were approaching the infiltration site. "Infiltration team, stand-by to deploy. Ops, crack the spacepool."

On the upper side of _Huginn_ , a medium-sized hatch opened, exposing the Tachikomas, braced and secured on the deck of the pool in two rows. Their thermoptics were already engaged, and a trigraphic system did its best to camouflage the opening to visual sensors.

"10 seconds to Separation", the Ops AI announced. "9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4… 3… 2.. 1.

"Separation."

On cue, all Tachikomas ramped their CM fields up to full, reducing themselves from near 1-ton war machines to specks of dust in terms of mass, then simultaneously pushed themselves of the deck in a precise vector.

The entire maneuver happened in the span of two seconds. Cold Gas RCS fired in rapid staccato, bleeding velocity and forcing the trajectories down towards the asteroid, then reduce approach velocity, all the while the CM generators bent the laws of physics into shape to accept that the Tachikomas really only weighed minuscule percentages of their true weight at the moment.

Then the units touched the hardened rock of Cedatis Station as gentle as a feather falling in terrestrial atmosphere, and immediately extruded nanomotile attachment creep from their feet to secure themselves against the gentle but existent 1m/s centripetal force that threatened to catapult them away from the station.

They were down.

Above them, the second team departed slightly more flashy; a 60-meter shuttle separating from one of _Huginn's_ parasite bays, clearing in a cloud of white RCS emissions, then igniting secondary engines to make the approach to Cedatis Station's docking bay.

Silently, under total com blackout, the Tachikomas headed for the manned structures that dotted the dwarf planet 500 meters ahead, jutting out of the even surface, walkways hanging into the black sky above.

Batou's own Tachikoma unit was following the lead element of the Major, Ishikawa and Borma, who were responsible for forcing their entry into the utility ducts that lined this part of Cedatis Station outer layer and were accessible through the structures ahead. Slowly, they were making their way over the dark grey substance of space rock; hammered by millions of years of debris impacts, porous but surprisingly strong - If you watched were you stepped.

Not that he was seeing much, the thermoptic camouflage eliminated their visual footprint. The only pointers, a light blue outline, was transmitted via simple fibreoptic cables that ran from unit to unit and ended in the Major's lead Tachikoma, a tiny low-bandwidth avenue of communication.

Above them, the dance of starships continued unabated against the rotating lights of the starfield and the half-visible marble of the gas giant the station orbited, lit in its exotic blues, violets and streaks of green. It was a strange image, the starships sometimes seeming to freeze into place as they plunged, actually accelerated upwards into the docks of Cedatis Station, sometimes with the assistance of yellow TugBots that had attached themselves to their hulls. Other times they screeched across the rolling heavens insanely fast, and that their positions weren't necessarily nose prograde only made the visual image more confusing.

So Batou forced his view back to the ground, and the approaching monoliths of impact gel, thermal isolation and metal foam superstructure that jutted out of the rock, and the heavy angled heatsink stacks next to them that pumped heat from some internal system into the depth of space. The Tachikoma's sensors detected no movement. No people in big, heavy hardshell suits or vacuum shells were working outside, no vacuum crabs were crawling across the structure to check integrity and replace debris-riddled components.

When they reached the utility walkway they would use to proceed to the airlock, they were forced to cut the fibre-optic lines so the Tachikomas could twist, use their multi-prehensile feet units to grab the ledges of the broad walkway, and lift themselves over and onto it using a little CM assistance. It was a fast, confusing move of machine acrobatics, and then the gentle tug he had felt for the last 5 minutes finally pulled everything down again, and he didn't feel like he was hanging of the tallest cliff in existence.

Batou sighed a relieved breath he didn't realize he had held. "Proceeding to Airlock", his Tachikoma AGI informed him, and now they proceeded remarkably faster, not at the slow crawl enforced by the nanomotile attachment creep and the cautious walk that had kept them from ripping loose rocks out of the surface of Cedatis Station, but a fast walk that carried them along the magnetic walkway at a good pace.

They circled around what was some form of surface extension of a vertical service shaft, including a cargo airlock at the bottom, following the ⟽"Airlock"⟽ signs and red lines on the wall and finally reached the big pressure door marked with another massive, orange "AIRLOCK".

A big, sealed manual control pad was embedded into the outer wall, with a big red "Emergency Entry" button presented at both sides. They weren't going to touch those.

Ishikawa's Tachikoma simply pressed a manipulator limb against the wall next to the pad. The integrated omnitool immediately went to work, nanoprobes infiltrating the panel superstructure, creating minuscule breaches as they accessed the circuit boards within, creating physical bypasses and opening access for Ishikawa into the software of the airlock control.

2 seconds later the cyberwarfare expert had taken control, and the outer airlock door obediently slid open on its hydraulics, exposing the long airlock space able to circulate maintenance bots in and out. There was enough space for four out of the eight Tachikomas, and Saito, Paz, Togusa and Borma pressed in immediately - Ishikawa, Kusanagi, Batou and Raven waited outside.

After five minutes of cycling, and close to running out of heatsink capacity, all eight personnel of Team Shadow were inside of Cedatis Station, and the Tachikomas immediately proceeded with venting the stowed-up heat. Discreetly of course, and after Ishikawa had inserted more worms into the environmental controls to subvert the temperature sensors and any monitoring algorithms without outright disabling the system.

At the same time, their human operators were extracting themselves from the pods, and retrieving the equipment they couldn't carry while sitting inside the acceleration couch to refix it onto their PCS units. Finally, weapons were unfolded from storage without a sound, and they all re-vanished into the invisible mantle of Thermoptic camouflage, splitting up and heading out into the low-gravity innards of Cedatis Station.

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

 **Bureau of Military Robotics**

 **Kenbishi Heavy Industries QPPCS-90X "Tachikoma"**

 **[ Current Status: Prototype Test Deployment ]**

 **[ Hardware Units in System Alliance Inventory: 500 ]**

 **[ Units in Testing: 100 (50 Earth, Sol, 30 Sol proper, 20 Arcturus) ]**

 **[ Deployed Units: 350 with System Alliance Paramilitary and Special Forces Units ]**

The Quadped Combat System 90 "Tachikoma" has been developed by Kenbishi Heavy Industries from 2228 until 2230 and was introduced into experimental deployments with the Systems Alliance in the same year.

The QPPCS-90X has been specifically designed as a next-generation all-purpose quadpedal Tankette for operations in wide open, urban, enclosed and space terrain, with an advanced locomotive system, nanodynamic chassis, four heavy-articulated propulsion legs and two primary actuator limbs, and enabled to carry one transhuman operator of humanoid shape inside a backpack-attached pod.

The Tachikoma is powered by a dual-source Fuel cell/Ultracap storage system with multi-hour battle endurance and days of locomotive operation; a Helium-3 Microfusion Pulse system was not installed due to space considerations and the fact that the Tachikoma is not intended for endurant operations independent of Supply lines. This fact aids the Tachikoma in reducing its thermal footprint significantly. Both systems are distributed throughout the primary chassis and the Pod system to reduce "headshot" capability to vital systems, instead only suffering partial reduction in power supply and storage capability.

Command and Control is driven by a Kenbishi-issue AICOS-9660 AGI(n), situated on six NPU primaries running in dual-mirror mode, integrated into the main chassis. Secundary processing operations and standardized OS operations are handled by a dual-redundant DCE with triple- and quad-redundancy in places.

The chassis of the Tachikoma supports semi-full nanodynamic reconfiguration with a semi-flexible armor system. While the chassis superstructure is not dynamic, hull and actuator configuration can be chosen relatively freely. Furthermore, this enables the units to quickly patch and repair even major damage; a nanorepair system takes care of more delicate damage.

For offensive systems the Tachikoma offers five primary weapon mounts - One gimballed central-line weapon mount, two actuator-mounted weapon mount, and two weapon pods extruding from the backpack pod.

The centerline mount supports either a GAU-920 7mm Kinetic Payload Gatling Driver or a 40mm Grenade Launcher system, with two standard M632 4mm Kinetic Energy Drivers mounted in the Actuators together with an M4201 Sluggun/Launcher system.

The Pod mounts are intended for loading Seeker and other launcher systems; standard load-outs include dual Micromissile boxes and two Anti-Armor Seeker launchers.

This gives the Tachikoma a solid mix of Anti-personnel, Anti-PA, Anti-Armor and Anti-Material firepower.

Defense is provided by a two-layered Kinetic Barrier system with optional Tech Armor reinforcement and Omniplating as "Frontman" and "Lockdown" settings, six-emitter Anti-Projectile lasers, and full-chassis ceramental/diamonoid armor plating.

Utility systems of the Tachikoma include all-limb mounted milspec Omnitool systems, an integrated vacuum/microgravity propulsion system, RCS, Jump Jet units, an MHDI propulsion system, vehicle-grade CM, grappling line extruders, a nanomotile surface attachment system, integrated drone fabbing, Battlefield ECM and Cyberwarfare capability, a recon sensor suite with extensive wall-penetrating capability, and thermoptic camouflage with 15-minute RTESO rating.

Final operational areas of the QPPCS-90 are urban pacification and operation, paramilitary intervention, and as a fully unmanned chassis with increased combat capabilities, as support for HPA and ACPA combat units.


	8. Intel Pt 4

The Sol Aérospatiale STS-30 Shuttle from _Huginn_ came in on a regular approach inside one of the approach corridors, matching the light rotation of the station and coming to relative rest next to the docking bay. Then it turned to thrust upwards and force itself onto a solid mating trajectory into one of the Hangars of Cedatis Station. Using cee-eem to indirectly boost the thrust power of its maneuvering engines, it penetrated the outer Kiggs field, held its position there for a second. Four heavy-duty docking arms extended smoothly, caught the craft, and pulled it through the inner Kiggs field, into the 0.2 g gravitic field of the bay.

Once the shuttle was level with the two-level boarding gangway on both sides, the arms locked in position, and pressurized walkways began connecting.

Miriam Walker and her team of three departed as soon as the personnel airlock was connected; wearing the sleeves of Belters and Vacuum Shells inside of personal counterpressure suits adorned with personal equipment, linear frames, and secondary life support, collapsed rapid-deployment helmets attached to the collar seals.

"Oye", she greeted the young belter working on something inside the docking airlock.

"Oye", the young man replied, busy working with a Transopter and some effector elements from his arm-mounted omnitools on some internal mechanics. Several small scarab-esque maintenance bots were assisting him.

Behind her, Miller took a respectful step around the young men, maneuvering the bulk of his Vacuum Maintenance Shell through the narrowing corridor; Clodovea Quinn Pinagpala Talavér and Israel Fekadu Bahta had no such problems, though Talavér had a massive Mars-born build of a body only exaggerated by later genetic modifications and almost scratched the ceiling with her bald head. Dust-red facepaint clearly portrayed her allegiance to the Red Void. Bahta's own face paint was heavier on other reds, creme light red, and dark blue; the colors of the Jovian system.

Walker herself had complex tattoos instead of face paint, the intricate silver on black facial tattoos of the Kuiper Republics on proud display, the constellations on her jaw, cheeks and temples showing the long hauls through the deep black of Sol and Arcturus; the two dusted Half-moons of the Sol-Arcturus Kuiper Belts connected by the thick double lines of the Mass Relays dominating her forehead.

They blended right into the mass of Spacers and Belters that populated the Docking Bay lobbies and loading zones, many of whom wore similar gear and facial decorations.

The hair was uniformly cut short or had been removed entirely; others had complex head-hugging weaves of hair and colored threads, but long, free-flowing hair was completely absent.  
Pistols and Carbines were common; sometimes people wore bulky Pulse Lasers or heavyweight low-velocity Slugguns, less likely to crack especially thin hulls compared to the hypervelocity ammunition of modern mass drivers; a few shotguns were intermixed. No explosives or heavier weapons to be seen, however. Not that any would be needed here; these weapons were as much if not more for show than actual use. Ports like Cedatis Station were enforced zones of peace. Nobody liked shootouts in here.

After some 5 minutes of strolling, they found a nice café in one of the main avenues, and sat down at one of the tables, dropping orders into the café mesh. Walker and Talavér both produced thick portable terminals, and retrieved jacks to plug themselves in.

Internally, a Beta took over playing Walker as a Belter engaged in serious talk in Mandachreol; externally, nothing changed. Just four Belters on shore leave, enjoying a good talk while waiting for their drinks.

Inside the confines of her PAN, Walker activated her internal comps, booted the interface software, and joined a small personal Vir environment, just a comfortable chair of light lines and surfaces hovering in the black. Then she kicked in the hacking systems, and dove straight into Cedatis Station's internal network.

She oriented herself. Her terminal had established a civilian link with the local mesh, which was distributed by an eclectic mixture of nodes worked into the walls and furniture of the station. It also picked up several ports of the stations own maintenance network, and almost immediately, she isolated the tunneled and encrypted network traffic that was definitely part of the hab infrastructure.

Activating the Eidolon, she branched of several exploring fingers, mapping out the internal network. Quickly she located two network switches and compromised both, reading out their network configuration files, and thus locating a more important server hub and its ports.

Now she would have to get more tricky. They had several objectives. One would be to locate the hostile cell physically inside Cedatis Station the teams would move to assault. The other was to get the team a discrete communications channel by piggybacking on the local com grid, which would also open the doors for the AIs aboard _Huginn_.

The later was easy. It took her around 20 subjective seconds to worm her way through the attack and defensive barriers around the server ports, another ten to fully compromise the firewall's discrimination capability, 5 to insert a proper coms package inside the server and then close down her insertion route, covering her tracks smoothly as she went.

Inside the main attack barriers, getting into the utility, maintenance and administration network was easier; she tunneled through the barriers in four seconds flat. Then she opened the second connection to let Talavér in, who concentrated on snooping out traces of the OFIF cell while Walker went to work subverting the com system.

Using a hidden administrator account, she executed a network ping and trawled the list of returns. The com system was run by a network of separate server systems, but directly connected at the user and administrator level by a series of pots; accessing it and installing the Section 9 com software inside a shell of camouflage and search deterrence programs was easily done in a few seconds, all the while playing decoy-and-hacking with the snooper software, ICE, and their supervising LAI functions.

She opened a new connection and pinged. Almost immediately, 20 new connections sprung up and answered. She inserted the one-time key and booted up the TacNet, synchronizing the dozens of Data Streams on the hijacked server.

* * *

[All callsigns, Ghost-One, Com and TacNet check.]

[This is Shadow-Six, confirming good TacNet, good Coms. On-site intel and sensor sync?]

[Hold one, Shadow-One. Ghost-Two, Intel feeds?]

[Standby on that,] Talavér replied. [I'd suggest you open the space-side connection in the meantime.]

[Check.] She launched an additional program in the com server, and switched over to the Extranet and SSTS com server; she ordered a new connection established with the Huginn using the same data connection used to sync the local extranet for the craft as well as Cedatis Station Approach and SysCon data, thus allowing the AI and Operations Department in the CIC to also link into the growing digital network.

[Huginn Ops, confirm good connection?]

[Confirming good connection], the Ops AI, callname Matheria, confirmed. Her field routines immediately transferred through the new connection, branching out and deploying virtual fingers deeper and deeper into the server network of Cedatis Station.

[Shadow, Mesh feeds are going live now. Local feeds to your BDIS, and we have IRWDs running on the Spimes. You will get a ping as soon as something is moving. ...Maintenance bots are also subverted, sending you IDs for spoofing.]

[Copy all. Status on location of OFIF cell?], Motoko Kusanagi asked.

[Sorry, that's a negative so far, Shadow-Six. No good on the network trace. I'm letting Matheria run a second one, but we might need to resort to other means.]

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

Inside a vertical maintenance tunnel full of physical cables and pipes, Motoko Kusanagi stopped her climbing ascend for a second. [Repeat that, Ghost. You have no ping on our Target?]

There was a moment of silence on the TacNet. [Ah, yes, Shadow-Six, sorry. But physical imaging of network node locations and Mesh structure shows no deviation from standards. No unexpected nodes, to unannounced rooms, nothing. Snoopers are all running empty.]

[We expected this,] Batou said on the TacNet. [They'd have to be mighty stupid to make it that easy for us.]

[I know!] she snapped back, planting her next hand a little bit more forcefully on the girder.

[Shadow-Six, Athena-Actual. I must confirm the assessment of Ghost-Two. There is no network traffic, and I have not been able to confirm any easy backdoors. There are several now-closed ports, but I cannot identify where they connect. There is a marked lack of protocols and logs that points towards this having been the OFIFs connection into the Extranet.]

[Well, at least something. Physical connection?] She continued climbing up the shaft, the next level and the blue walkway platform there already in sight.

[Unable to extrapolate. The designated ports are part of the standard mesh and extranet backbone in your area, maintenance pathway 062.]

A visual overlay popped into Kusanagi's vision, outlining a shaft that ran the curvature 600 meters into the crust of the planetoid. That would make it outer maintenance, life support and support industry level, right? Next to some major avenues and habitat expansion, and in relatively easy reach of the docks and storage areas?]

[Yes. But there is no data on the official blueprints for a space of sufficient size.]

[That has to be them. Now, how to confirm?]

[There is one possibility.] Matheria suggested. [Installations like Cedatis Station have to conduct regular corrections of their spin due to imported and reduced force produced by the shifts, gain, and losses of mass through moving personnel, cargo, and spacecraft. The management system has to have been aware of the mass distribution generated by this illegal construction activity, even if it is hidden from regular purview of Operators not loyal to the OFIF cause. Forensic reconstruction of a nominal burn maneuver with real burn maneuvers, or hacking of the real Mass Distribution archives, could give is the exact location of the OFIF installation, its layout, and major mass distributions and equipment, depending on the level of detail and scrubbing they applied to the data before entering it.]

[Get on it. We're moving into the general area.] Kusanagi switched channels as she easily pulled herself onto the walkway and re-deployed her carbine.[Stalker-Six, disembark and complete the perimeter. I want you in the industrial area, ready to move in and open a second front when we storm the place.] Behind her, Batou easily lifted himself up onto the walkway in his armored Ares Enterprises MO-2-Niner Warrior Shell Suit, then helped Togusa up as she took point and began sneaking down the walkway, carbine up and scanning.

[Check, Shadow-Six. Stalker is moving now.]

[Ghost and Athena, you are cleared to hack those records. Get me positions, layout and as much other data as possible, and pipe it into the TacNet as you get it. We are moving into the area now.]

[Copy. Moving to hack.]

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

Walker knew something was up as soon as she began inching forward into the propulsion management system and dipped her metaphorical toe in the water. Her warning software went off at once, and virtual cages snapped shut around two guardian LAIs that have almost detected her, inserting subversion code to shut the virtual watch dogs up.

[Athena-One…]

[I see it.] The Ops AI sent its own digital watchdogs into the system, cracking the firewalls open as she did. [Deploying forensics and… oh, that's nice.]

Walker saw it herself. The software was indeed diverting them to another file server for the mass profile; an incredible fast move but noticeable when you looked for it, waited for it.

[Isolating address.] The AI threw a file over to Walker. Well, would you look at that. Trying to access the file, she triggered and isolated more programs.[Definitely something hidden here. Ghost-One is encountering enemy infosec non-compliant with Hab standards.] Analysis results from decompiling the software dropped into the network. [Aaand that's confirmed OFIF coding. Breaching the files.]

Alarms went off in her head almost immedately. Another piece of software had just waited for this, and almost simultaneously a data package escaped from her grasp, slipped through the quarantine cordon they had erected to prevent just that by triggering hidden-away functionalities in the OS code, and into the wider net. [SHIT!] She and Matheria immediately moved to contain it, but it slipped through their grasp, transferred itself from node to node. Capable of greater multitasking, Matheria retrieved the mass distribution file and immediately used her cognitive capabilities to dissect it, running an LAI swarm over it to quickly isolate deviations.

[Got it. Shadow-Actual, Stalker-Actual, I have isolated the OFIF installation. Sending you now. Be aware that we tripped an enemy alarm and are only able to delay it; short of a full netcrash the enemy becoming aware that something is up - Estimated window is 1 Minute 30 Seconds.]

Inside the TacNet, the digital wireframe of the enemy installation was unfolding. Someone had gone through years of work, carefully excavating large rooms out of the dwarf planet's rock beyond the supporting district, creating caverns which were subsequently isolated, reinforced and tied into their own life support and power supply. All connected to the station through tunnels officially designated either as maintenance tunnels or avenues for later expansion.

"That is way larger than we expected," Batou remarked.

"Yeah. That's a volume of several cubic kilometers. No way they dug that out without local support", Ishikawa supplied.

Kusanagi took the layout in with the aid of analysis implants. Judging by the blueprint, they would be approaching the upper layers of the OFIF facilities - A series of one- and two-story rooms that would probably include the servers, judging by the mass distribution in the file, who listed heavy, high-dense objects as part of the room. They were connected by a series of tubes and corridors, one of which would be ending into the maintenance avenue they were approaching due to the clue of the hidden network switch that had been the installations avenue into the Extranet.

Underneath those room was, connected by several staircases, a second layer of two-story rooms, connected by what also seemed to be cargo elevators. Storage maybe, or maintenance. Beyond and around wrapped two living sections, and beyond that lay large three-story caverns probably serving as storage.

Alright then. They could handle that, between their equipment and gear. [Tachikomas, close up, prepare to force in with us. Stalker, I want you to breach on what seems to be the storage level, lowest avenue, through access tunnel 116. We will pincer them between us.]

[ _Understood Major!_ ]  
[ _Roger._ ]

[All callsigns, be advised we are moving in to breach. Time to alarm is 1 minute. The enemy will be aware something is up, so expect heavy opposition. Avoid computers and stack damage, but fire for direct shell neutralization.]

She picked up the pace, hurrying down the corridor towards a T-junction, picked up the run as she grabbed behind to her backpack to retrieve a cylinder with spherical recon drones. She slammed into the cover of the corner, took a quick gaze beyond, then gave Batou the lead and hurried on behind him, using her boot-mounted attachment strips to enable a fast pace in the low gravity, twisting the drone container she had finally retrieved open with one hand. Their heavy feet banged on the girder walkway, but that was irrelevant. Stealth was secondary now.

[ _Huginn_ Ops copies. We will stand-by to assist as able. Also, be advised that Party Crasher is on standby to deploy if necessary. Will now advise _Muninn_ that Operations commences shortly.]

[Copy. Shadow is approaching breaching site.] The lid open, she rolled the already active drones out onto the floor, letting them drop, catch themselves on thin spider legs, and skitter off immediately. The TacNet flooded with Drone signals as the rest of the squad deployed their own drones, her ARO filling with more and more data and graphics.

[Understood. Alarm packet has reached the isolated network, a set of hidden mesh nodes just went live in one of the connecting tunnels. I am seeing spiking network traffic, watch hounds entities and ICE; secondary entities are erecting Attack barriers. Moving to intercept and contain.]

Kusanagi allowed herself a smile inside her helmet. It was a toothy, bloodthirsty smile. [Doesn't matter now, Athena. It is far too late.]

* * *

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** And that is it. Our second, and far larger Operation is about to go hot... in the next chapter.


	9. Knock-knock Pt 1

_The modern soldier does not rule the battlefield by skill, or by equipment, or by determination._

 _All of these things can be made, added, removed, and tweaked as desired._

 _The modern soldier rules the battlefield through coordination, information supremacy, and the right combination of tools and capabilities for the right job._

 _Diversity is paramount for success._

 **SenseNet Recording Motoko Kusanagi**

 **2197.09.26 09:36 Hours Local**

 **FOB Himeiji, [REDACTED]**

* * *

At first glance, the maintenance corridor seemed just like another of the thousands of tubes that had been dug out of the rock over decades of construction activity by an autonomous tunnel digger. Sharp teeth and hydraulic breakers had cut into the rock, used precisely tuned gravitic fields and an oil-based washing fluid to remove the loose detritus efficiently inside the 1 m/s spin gravity field, then coated the newly formed corridors down with high-tensile dual-component polymer, isolation and sealant foam, and anchored light composite lunacrete (that is, just light foamed silicate made from the excavated rock reinforced with binding fibres) panels against the new walls.

Then ConstructoBots and Shells had moved in with their many-limbed bodies to install blue alloy scaffolding and life support, bolting in air exchangers, heating mats, gravitic generators, then the spimes and mesh nodes and the power and cooling support for all of it. Lastly, thousands of kilometers of support pipes, data cables, superconductive power leads, coolers and heaters were moved in, the future utility feeds to power, heat, cooling and drive machinery in rooms that would be dug out of the surrounding rock.

The T-intersection 250 meters down the corridor however, was a deviation from the plans. Someone had smoothly expanded the corridor, rebuilding cabling and piping on the left wall as they went, rerouting feeds over the ceiling and through the floor while branching off a few for himself.

From the scanner feed of the Recon bot that had crawled 100 meters in front of them to establish an LSP, the T-intersection ended in a thick, standardized bulkhead as they were found in regular intervals; internal pressure seals that served to section off one part of the system off from the next, designed to slam shut and form small airlocks in case some section lost pressure… for whatever reason. The only accepted way for damage to occur this deep inside an asteroid habitat, under 500 meters of solid rock, was a relativistic impact (which would crack the station open anyway, 600 kilometer-diameter and billions of tons of mass notwithstanding) or weapons fire; in short, man-made violence. But then, that _happened_.

The door was almost certainly spimed; preferably they would have avoided it entirely and tunneled in through the wall or ceiling, but the conduits made that impossible.

Her right gauntlet omnitool produced a tiny disk that was shoved into her waiting hand; she threw the Dazzler unit into the T-corridor junction. One laser pulse later, the device had acquired the reflections of tiny Spime-standard Microlens arrays and hit every one with a holographic laser projection. From one second to the next, the spimes weren't able to image the real corridor anymore. Some VI within was probably going off this second and warbling about ECM, but they'd be breaching in seconds anyway. And Kusanagi had already expected and accounted for a breach through hostile fire.

"Breach plan Bravo-Four. Stack up." She bypassed the T-junction and the door directly behind it, sealing of the smooth curves of the junction, and pressed herself against the round wall of the junction, carbine up and pointing at the door, slapping another dazzler against the ceiling. Batou held position behind her, allowing Togusa to enter the junction in his heavy-duty Calisto Munitions ETOPA-60R Power Armor. The unit had a visibly bulky linear frame underneath the outer armor plating, with flexible weave and trigraphics-covered Omniplating covering the synthetic muscles and joints.

Togusa slung his Seburo ETC-5R combat carbine left low, where it attached to the frontal SmartPack via magnetic attachment points, and procured a nondescript black polymer device from his backpack SmartPack while slapping another dazzler onto the left corridor wall, then stepped forward and attached the device to the door before pulling a physical strip of the device, exposing a fat red mark underneath.

"ETDD is set."

He stepped back and shouldered his carbine with only the right hand, bringing the left, outer gauntlet forward and up. The breaching shield's physical framework unfolded smoothly from its storage unit mounted onto the armour, until it had expanded into an octagonal shape and arrested. The black surface material visibly stiffened as the internal ballistic material was electrified.

At the same time, Kusanagi pressed in, Batou following her, setting up slightly staggered in front of the bulkhead. Ishikawa came fourth, then Borma and Paz on either side of the T-junction; Saito and Raven brought up the back in the same formation.

"Set."

Kusanagi threw a last glance at the Squad Realtime Status and the Strategic Situations display, both expanding in her vision and third eye. Stalker had managed to set themselves up in record time, and were approaching the second breach position guns up.

The enemy was now aware of their intrusion for maybe 30 seconds, less than 10 seconds that something was happening at this bulkhead, as signaled by the scramblers. Enough time for automated defenses, but not for stacking up layered defenses. Waiting for Stalker however would give them even more time to do that however.

Analytics implants juggled percentages and probabilities for a few milliseconds. Decisions were made and introduced to the Ego they were serving.

A cool calm overcame her, and she kicked on the squad-wide Battle Mode. Every single combat implant, every psychoaugment, every combat system would be running into high gear now, the complex battletrance of the modern transhuman soldier settling in.

"Shadow is breaching. In three… two.. one."

* * *

 **= Chapter 2 - "Knock-knock" =**

 **-| May 17th, 2232 |**

* * *

It all happened within the span of a single second.

Integrated T-Ray and Microwave radar transopters in the Victus Munitions ETDD-4008 pinged; reflecting off the interior of the first bulkhead - And the second one two meters behind it, forming yet another airlock.

The LAI running on the aftermarket control module of the demolitions device queried its breaching instructions and tripped Case 2 "Long breach", configuring the geometries of its projectors and pinging the TacNet with the information its sensors had recovered.

The CM field snapped into place in an instant, base geometries of complex dark energy patterns extending from the complex lense array set into the device's bottom. Then the geometry deteriorated, and atoms began vibrating as they became lighter and lighter. The crystal structure of both bulkhead doors melted, then vaporized in milliseconds under subject of altered mass. To the human eye, the door flashed from cherry red to orange to blinding radiant white for a single second.

Then the gravitic field cut in, and catapulted the hot mass of metallic, composite and conductive materials that had made up the bulkheads away from the breaching device - straight into the muzzles of a Hahne-Kedar HKR-2 quad-legged sentry gun that had propped itself up before the airlock, ready to fire its KED minigun through the material of the inner door. The vaporized door material, rapidly turning back into hot dust as it left the influence of the degenerate countermass field, clogged the accelerators shut, and coated everything inside the X-junction behind the airlock in a grey blanket.

As Togusa stormed forward through the fresh breach into the airlock, the sentry gun exploded in a small but spectacular fireball as its railguns short-circuited, the far more electrically resistant metal dust inside the accelerator superheated, and flash-vaporized with destructive results. Shrapnel pinged ineffective against the outer kinetic barrier field of the breaching shield, and Togusa simply shoved the gun's wreckage aside with his now-500 kilograms of armored mass.

The sentry had propped itself up in a small X junction - the corridor ahead was cut off by another bulkhead door some 50 meters downrange. To the left and right, open archways offered a surprising view of rooms beyond. The walls were barebones, cable conduits still exposed.

[Going left]. He rotated in slightly to face the left access, a launcher snapping up on his left shoulder and flinging a Multi-Band Flash disk grenade into the room. "Grena…!" someone inside managed to shout out of wired reflex before the primary scatter charge went off, followed by a cacophony of bangs and bright optical flashes together with a squelch across the EM frequencies.

Togusa waded in, combat shield still up, using its sensors to take the room in at a burst of 12x cognitive acceleration.

He was on the second level of a two-story room, a long U-shaped platform with an open space in the far middle. A single broad staircase formed an in-cavity connection between the two levels. Several thick metal pylons with matte black finish formed a vertical structural element and also served as anchors for the platform and the bases for massive cable channels filled to the brim with CATX-7 cables that ran across the ceiling in thick but orderly bundles.

The endpoints of these cables rested on large, electric work-rated tables - massive black cases full of computer hardware, massive holographic and trigraphic display rigs, hardware interfaces, and comfortable chairs with integrated interfacing hardware.

The probable users of these workstations had all gathered in two groups along the lower part of the U around large equipment cabinets and had been in the process of getting weapons and linear frame-equipped armor out when Togusa burst through the door. Only two were fully armored up and had their helmets on, managing to shrug off the cluster flashbang. Even so, the grenade had had a far reduced effectiveness.

[ Threat Assessment - 10 Shell targets. All equipped with Anti-Flash equipment. Light Combat Augs highly probable, expect more augmented capabilities. ]

Argraphic data sprang up as data analysis systems noted more details - Equipment, weapons, heatsink and ammunition packets, the signs of visible arm and neck augmentations, but Togusa's attention was now lighting-focussed on the welcoming committee.

Two Saber Robotics General Infantry Units had been stored in wall creches, close to the entryway Section 9 had just breached through, and both had deployed once the ECM alarm of the door spimes had gone off, shouldering heavy Combat Robot-issue NR-99 Heavy Assault Rifles and aiming them squarely at the access door .

With a clear view of the threat before them, both machines immediately cut loose, and Togusa grit his teeth as shots slammed into the shield's reinforced barriers, kinetic feedback hitting his arm as if someone was bombarding him with a flurry of angry fists. _And that would be Threat number 1._ He sighted the digital crosshair on the unit's torso through the AR-graphic that made his shield look transparent and fired anti-materiel rounds on Burst Auto.

His fire chewed straight into armor as the unit lacked shields (not unsurprising given eezo was relatively hard to come by; armor was not), and the machine began evasive actions, trying to spread out his fire over its chest armor - a notion Togusa counteracted with AI-assisted precision, keeping his aim true. With a slight click his assault carbine switched to another of the small secondary ammunition blocks, and several 6mm explosive payload flechettes buried themselves into the chest of the GIU. It dropped with a massive bang as it lost power, the other following a second later as Batou's own LMG ripped the unit to shreds with dozens of ultra-dense depleted uranium kinetic flechettes fired over Togusa's shoulder.

The red outline figures of the two GIUs dropped off the Local Threat Window with flashes of blue and turned grey the same instance Togusa's HUD confirmed the kills with the same animation, a blue outline and filling running down the formerly orange outline of the units.

The target indicators of the Tactical Directory System jumped to the right and directed his attention to the 10 OFIF fighters who had used the time it had taken Togusa and Batou to take down the GIUs to get themselves back up to speed. Fourteen mass accelerators cut loose, and Togusa and Batou both dived into cover, letting cee-eem assist them in getting out of the firing line as fast as possible, squeezing off bursts from their weapons as they fell, pinging into barriers, Togusa collapsing his combat shield just in time to catch his fall with the now-open left hand. A nice thick series of reinforced polycrete slabs that had probably been intended as somewhat sloppy screening for the defenders gave them enough cover to eject heatsinks and load new ones from the integrated reserves and both primed their omnitools in a move already executed dozens of times.

Togusa launched a dual set of ECM/Overload grenades from his right Omnitools ready-launch mag, the tiny units arcing up and about into the room proper. "EC…" another voice pressed out before both devices squealed junk data into the electromagnetic spectrum and detonated into "shrapnel" of active release elements and electro-conductive nanodust. Lightning arced through the air and forced kinetic barrier emitters into Save Mode, and Batou's own units arrived only a second behind. The incendiary devices went off with dull thumps of plasma-flash explosions, and both men popped out of cover, squeezing off short bursts aimed at heads or center-mass as they moved to the right and deeper into the room. Togusa's three burst felled one fighter, missed, then hit another OFI fighter with downed barriers, spraying blood and cyberbrain casing across workstation monitors and sending them into protesting flickers of concussion damage and optical projection faults.

Batou's LMG-primary cut a literal swathe of destruction across one table island; cutting down the three other OFI fighters in a bloody mess of dozens of center-mass hits and destroyed computing equipment. [Watch your fire!], Togusa snapped out as he flipped back into cover with his suit barrier tanking hits, another GIU from the far end of the room taking a bead on him with its NR-99.

Outside in the corridor, a DMR boomed like distant thunder through the audio filters, temporarily blocking out the sounds of the firefight from the room across the corridor currently being stormed by the Major and Ishikawa. Down the far side of their room, something flashed and debris and smoke flew into the room together with a loud explosion through another access on the room's long end. [Corridor turret is down!] Saito reported, [I am moving left.]

He rolled into the cover of the arch out of the settling cloud of metallic dust, a spectre under thermoptic camouflage, and brought his rifle up in an instant. Someone noticed the faint motion and drift of the dust and began to open his mouth before Saito's first three-round burst breached his barriers and took his head off with surgical precision. He switched targets and dropped a second OFI fighter before popping an on-armor smoke charge and breaking cover for a new position, return fire from a hostile with two handheld heavy machine pistols shredding the air behind him.

 _Time to take out that bot on the far side._ Togusa thought-clicked through his secondary weapon options and selected the Micromissile launcher mounted in his right pylon. A secondary window in his HUD plotted the trajectory based on TacNet data and one of the "ears" mounted on his heavy helmet, and Togusa took a deep breath, waited out the next suppressive burst from the HAR, before throwing himself forward out of cover and turning around, giving the launcher space to deploy and the heading to fire. It popped out and over his shoulder with an electronic whir, and ejected two Micromissiles only an instance later.

The two solid-propellant missiles jetted through the air in a slight arc before diving down into their targets. The GIUs lacked active laser defenses and kinetic barriers to intercept the missiles; their AIs thus resorted to trying to shoot down the missiles with fire from their assault rifles. The targeted unit shot down one missile, which died in a squelch of ECM, which gave the second one enough time to reach effective fusing distance, impact the chest of the GIU, and blow its main power unit in the chest apart with a HEAT warhead. The robot dropped with a heavy bang of metal on metal, smoke curling from its chest before an electrical fire erupted in the ruined power cell.

A group of four fighters took the window of opportunity the suppressive fire by the GIUs had created to charge Batou's position, with one of them lobbing a heavy, classical grenade over the cover. The charge broke as soon as Batou's own Defense Management Suite detected the approaching explosive device and used a shoulder-mounted emitter on the MO-69 Warrior to propel the explosive right back at the fighters.

"Oh fu…" one managed to curse before the simple-fused explosive detonated and ripped the front two, including the thrower, to shreds. The other two losts their barriers completely while Batou's were only weakened, and fell to 10-round bursts from the LMG. [Let's end these idiots. Athena, get the Bots off our back. Mem-tac out!]

Batou plucked a hand-thrown multi-mission tactical payload grenade of his own from his belt, primed the device with a flip of the arming cap and a deep depression of the button underneath, and lobbed the device into the room with an underhand toss.

The cluster flashbangs went off with a cacophony of sounds, but this time, a heavy load of solid-state smoke pellets and Recon Microbots joined them. The workspace filled with dense IR-scrambling smoke and ECM, and the fire of the GIUs suddenly cut off as their systems were bombarded with cyberattacks from the team's portable NetWar nodes.

Togusa vaulted his cover, slid over the table, and ran almost straight into the highlighted enemy. His carbine's over-barrel shotgun barked three times, finishing at extreme close range, and the Shell collapsed, his chest opened up in a bloody crater to expose the artificial organs underneath the armored ribcage within.

Next to him, Saito vaulted his own cover with the left hand free, a violet-blue corona flaring up around his shoulder and traveling down his arm. With a mnemonic gesture, he ripped three enemies out of cover and suspended them in mind-air inside a lift field, then shot down the middle enemy who helplessly flailed in mid-air down with a single aimed shot into the chin guard, stopping only for an instant to steady himself in a low hunch, left leg stretched out forward.

In advance, Togusa angled right and shot the left-most enemy out of the air; an opening a hardsuited woman in cover in front of him used to pop up, blast Togusa with an arm-integrated shotgun that decompacted from her arm guard, and then charge him with her right hand balling into a first.

The trigraphic pop-up around the quick-forging carbide Omniblade alerted Togusa half a second after his Threat Assessment AI; instead of swinging around the carbine for a potentially blocked burst at close range, he dropped it with both hands, not bothering to sling it, and brought his left hand up, own omnitool priming its effectors, right hand dropping towards the massive holster for his revolver strapped to the right thigh.

The omniblade unfolded, and the woman came in for a textbook stab into the chest, the omnitool would negate any barrier formations at such close range, and the ultrathin carbide would have no issues piercing through his chest armor and stabbing into his heart, where it would shatter into equally sharp shrapnel.

 _Just like in training. Trust your skills._

His left hand dove towards the hot-orange shape of the blade, omnitool discharging. The trigraphic stayed in place, but underneath it, the carbide blade shattered as negating mass effect fields pierced the suspending envelope of the hostile omnitool. From one second to the next, the woman attacking Togusa was disarmed.

His left hand latched onto her fist, and he caught her in the iron grip of the Power Armor Suit, artificial muscles squeezing tightly, and he sidestepped around her left, twisting the arm into a lock as his right drew the revolver.

He rammed the heavy weapon right into the now-exposed armpit, where only armored weave and none of the mainline barrier emitters were protecting her from penetrative hits, and fired a quick double-tap. The woman went limp, and he shoot her once more in the side of the helmet. Ceramic armor material sprayed everywhere from the close discharge, and an ugly-colored mix of blood, brain tissue and white ceramic partially splashed on Saito, who had moved up as Togusa performed his CQB execution.

On the right side, Batou was less sophisticated, simply hosing down two OFI fighters in chest and leg hardsuit armor with his LMG, shouldered a third out of the way before slamming an right foot down on his chest and caving it in, then switched his fire to more GIU units on the far side of the room. The robots actually ducked into cover, and Batou moved up to flank the last group of fighters in the middle of the room.

The same group was straight in the path of Saito's advance. Saito realized he had overextended himself a bit, and cursed himself. _No time to backpedal now._ He took the burst of fire that broke his barriers, then simply threw his heavy DMR straight into the face of the enemy, increasing its weight with his biotics as it impacted, then quick-drew his Carnifex and shot the human in a classic Mozambique drill. A dirty kick to the right leg brought the second one down on his knees, and Saito shot him in the face almost off-handedly.

The third and last fighter had completed his own transition to an even heavier sidearm than Saito's Carnifex when Togusa simply bashed him over with the butt of his carbine, then fired a burst into his downed form.

With all human fighters taken care off, Batou contented himself with finishing off the robots. Under a renewed cyberattack by the supporting AIs, the units froze up. Batou simply sawed them into pieces through the flimsy cover of the desks.

[Sound off, L1!] Togusa said.

[Clear Center!]

[Clear Right!]

[Major, how are things on your end?]

[Encountering resistance in transition to R-R2. Watch your doors, you might have incoming any second!]

[The corridor is locked down] Borma reported. [Tachikomas are in in 10 seconds.]

A distant explosion audible shook the metallic foundations.

[Stalker, report!], Kusanagi asked in alarm. [What was that?]

[Sorry Ghost, Stalker has engaged and disabled an enemy quadped on the storage/garage level. That was the power cell going.]

"Speaking of which, someone get that GIU out," Batou remarked. The robot downed by Togusa's micromissile was by now a happily burning bonfire of plastics and electrical components, fueled by the still burning power cell.

Saito bowed down to retrieve his DMR.

Then suddenly, Togusa screamed as he was ripped off his feet, and new fire screamed through the room.


	10. Knock-knock Pt 2

"...what the fuck is even going on?..."

"...we got intruders in the garage, engaging the security mechs..."

"..something on the external Mesh is fighting us, I think we have an enemy AI in play…"

"...reboot the attack barriers' secondary execution. Switch them to dual-vote mode. I want the core systems uncompromised and the barriers tight!..."

"...repeat, we're getting overru-[Connection Lost]"

"...something's attacking our Security Bots, we're losing effective fighting capability and our Spime Network is dropping out; uh, I think we can call that confirmed subversion in progress…"

"...I WANT REINFORCEMENTS IN THE SPINWARD CORRIDORS AND I WANT THEM NOW!..."

"...working on that, we got jumped!..."

"...uh yeah, we kind of need them out now…"

"...start scrubbing those terminals. Flash, then destroy. Not the other way around! Flash! Destroy! Don't give them one quantum of data to work with!..."

"...wait a second, what's that package doing there? Terminate that, and FUCKING REBOOT THE FIREWALLS!..."

[ INTEL FEED SUBVERSION WORM ID 5a4df210-ca60-4517-9244-6368293513b7 FEED LOST ]

* * *

Matheria's sentient systems were reveling in the situation at hand, PAWLOW scores skyrocketing as she multitasked a dozen different tasks at once, sub-components chattering and recombining like a small patheon, in turn directing harems of LAIs and VIs, who controlled conventional software; a complex, interconnected hierarchy of pieces that hungrily devoured every piece of data to assess the situation inside Cedatis Station and assist the assault teams.

Using the team's own mobile nodes and the station's communication network as backbones, she and the other AIs of the _Huginn_ were the invisible force working in the background that processed and analysed data, identified threats and opportunities, trawled tactical profiles, and coordinated team movement in coordination with the in-field commanders using subtle neural nudges.

As such, they were also the first who became of a somewhat uncoordinated counterattack on Team Shadow, arriving first at Room Right 02, then at Room Left 01, relative of the breaching point.

The predictive onboard TEIRESIAS suite immediately devoured the tactical picture and neatly spat out possibilities and weighted option trees scant milliseconds later. The enemy had deployed three biotics among the reinforcements, two into R-R02, one in R-L01. The counterattack in 02 had been largely unsuccessful, on account of Ishikawa making liberal use of explosives and field engineering with his omnitools to barricade the only viable entrance, which had seen one of the biotics being hit with a Phase Nullifier head-on and thus fizzling out his biotic move; the other was now engaged in a heavy CQB duel with Motoko Kusanagi and was, so far, holding his ground. Ishikawa and Raven were struggling with the conventional reinforcements, including a lance of heavier combat robots that now sported shields, and were slowly being pushed back across the room. Raven in particular had suffered a leg injury after over-extending with a charge, and was now dragged into cover by Ishikawa while the medigel patching went into effect.

Over in R-L01, the situation wasn't much better. Togusa had been hit with a lift field and a hard vector and was practically being thrown through the room, Saito had been caught bowing down retrieving his DMR, and Batou had been forced away from his position near the doorway by a similar group of heavy combat robots.

She assessed her progress in compromising the enemy network. The total subversion percentage was only slowly climbing, and the enemy leveled heavier and more clever defenses against her, but the first major play was almost in place.

Furthermore, the Tachikomas were only seconds away now - but the Section 9 Operators would have to survive those few crucial seconds intact.

* * *

"Shitfuckdammit!" Batou cursed as he dodged left and away with the assistance of his jump pack, ducking as low as he could behind the computer tables to avoid the fire of the sudden reinforcements which had announced themselves by flinging Togusa across half the room, his body dropping onto a table group at the left end close to the archway they had entered through at first, and landing with the sound of breaking display glass and spalling wood.

Batou brought his SMWS-06HR Werewolf back up, switched over to the Seeker launcher, and risked a discharge straight through the relatively flimsy edge of the table, triangulating using the enemy fire and data from the recon bots to guide his fire. One of the robots finally dropped after three seeker rounds had blasted through its barriers, armor and burrowed into the chest unit, spitting small shrapnel, black hydraulic and white CF fluid from under the edges of its torso armor; the other fell after Batou sacrificed three of the ball-shaped recon drones on the one which just rounded the corner, blowing its backpack unit up with the drones onboard suicide charges. _Only 4 left_ , he huffed and activated a Shield booster, refilling his KBCs. With a thought-click, he switched over to Railgun mode, letting the weapon shift over to the other weapon module. _Time to stop playing games. They want to roll heavy, happy to oblige._

The weapon cycled a fresh heatsink and the first of the six heavy sabots in the ready-use magazine, and signaled readiness with a cheerful beep in his head. He vaulted out of cover and sighted in on the first robot who had taken the lead, a heavy three-barreled automatic shotgun in metal hands. Batou fired.

Saito saw Togusa go flying out of the corner of his eye, and felt the sympathetic harmonies of the edges of a biotic sleight on his own nodules in the same moment. The DMR was forgotten. Against a biotic, it would be largely useless, moreso because he wouldn't get the chance to get enough range to effectively use it.

The best option now was CQB. An option he did not look forward to at all. He had had several clashes with batarian, Asari and Turian biotics during his Blue Suns days, and each one had been an ugly experience in every aspect. When two sophonts with the ability to bend the universe to their whims clashed, the results tended to be messy, for the combatants and their environment alike. Then his eyes fell on the Tactical Overview Window, and he had an idea.

He dove towards the biotic's legs using only his bio-augmented legs and some minor CM, feinting an attack that would rip the legs out from under him. His reaction was to bring the left leg back for a biotic-assisted kick, and raise his arms in preparation of more mnemonic gestures, most likely another lift field followed by a push into an environmental object, intended to wind Saito.

He had waited exactly for this moment of vulnerability, and used his maneuvering thrusters and a flare of the cee-eem to recover from the low lunge and turn it into a high grab around the biotic's torso, hitting himself and his opponent with a lift field simultaneously. They both spiraled off the ground, apparently weightless without the influence of gravity, and Saito whirled the biotic around with another pulse of his maneuvering thrusters.

Then the biotic suddenly detonated the lift field. Saito screamed, and so did his counterpart, as the field flared from the destructive interference, self-reinforced in a harmonic reaction of dark energy waveforms, and caused feedback into the eezo nodules that permeated his nervous system. Saito's Medical Suite tripped the safety feedback and slammed implanted cut-outs shut at the same time as nano swarms converged on inflamed nerve tissue; the lift field collapsed as his biotics were momentarily surgically amputated, and they both dropped to the ground, barely managing to catch themselves on their feet.

"You should be fighting with us, brother, not with the oppressors!", the other biotic suddenly shouted over the sounds of the still-continuing firefight, grabbing both of Saito's arms and struggling, his biotics flaring with emotional boil-over and mnemonic bleed.

Around them, the room got further demolished as Togusa rejoined the firefight and hosed down the OFI fighters at the other end of the room, bombarding them with Overloads, burst fire, and an underbarrel seeker, then jump-jetted across the gap in the U-shaped second floor and flanked the entrance together with Batou. An explosive-cored omniblade was sunk into a combat robot and detonated with a muffled bang; elsewhere metal tore as Batou ripped two units who had tried to rush and bind him apart with augmented strength. Pistols barked, and servos whirred.

"I. _Am not_. YOUR BROTHER!", Saito shouted and jammed a biotics-infused and barrier-covered knee into the enemy's abdomen, who took the blow with his own barriers, but still staggered. "And you most certainly aren't MINE!" His left fist hit the biotic straight in the head, and slammed him to the right. A balled right fist channeled a grip field, and the man was abruptly stopped mid-stagger, an opening Saito used to bring in another reinforced right - Which the man caught with his open hand and a catch field, Saito's hand running into something that felt like air turned syrup.

"THEN YOU DIE WITH THEM!", he shouted back and tackled Saito. Over his shoulder, Saito saw the light blue friendly outline enter the room at high speed, already turning to face the room. He grinned. "No, ' _brother'_. I won't"

[NOW!] He slammed the biotic with an overhead vector field, temporarily fixing him in place, and dove out of the way.

[ _Yes, Mr. Saito!_ ]

The GAU-920 spun up with a shrill noise and cut loose.

Inside the confined quarters of the room, the anti-material gatling gun was like the thunderstrike of Zeus. Its high-hypersonic rounds ripped the air in half in a massive, laser-like flash of ionized air, and 100 rounds connected with the exposed biotic in the first second alone.

The explosive payloads were really just overkill.

The man was shredded into fine bits in the first 50 hits, his barrier flashing and collapsing helplessly and his biotic aura flickering with the harsh protest of the photon fields of eezo nodules - then his torso was torn apart. The gun stopped firing for a miniscule moment, the Tachikoma tracking a new target before opening up again.

The world seemed to vibrate even inside Saito's cushioned and isolated helmet, and nothing else was audible over the sheer noise the weapon made.

Then, from one second to the next, there was silence.

The far wall of the room was a slaughterhouse. Blood and mechanical fluids were sprayed everywhere, dozens of craters had been punched into the isolation and regocrete panels. The access door was a flimsy remnant of its former self, and beyond lay several more combat robots and the corpse of another OFI fighter. Through the far door, several shells were just vanishing, in a full rout. "Fuck, they got Quads, they got Quads!", someone could be heard before the door slammed shut.

" _Everyone alright?_ ", the Tachikoma asked.

"Yeah." Batou helped Togusa back to his feet. "Let's go." He nodded towards the shell of the door. Saito finally retrieved his DMR, checking the weapon over and noting it had cooled down on its own, then keyed his com, speaking: "Shadow-Six, we are ready to proceed."

[Copy. We more in three columns. Tachikomas on all three. Togusa, Batou and Saito are left, Borma and Paz are center, Ishikawa, Raven and me are right. Move out!]

* * *

[ NEW INTEL FEED - DECRYPTION ENEMY ENCRYPTED MESHCOM 852 NOW ONLINE ]

"...Sir, uh… we lost the counterattack, and the second line's..."

"...In retreat, I know. They deployed Quadpeds. Which ones?"

"Looks like a new model….And we just lost that feed. Spimes are dropping out, we're losing the bandwith war."

"...So, AIS, N7 or Section 9."

"...How did… did they find us?"

"Doesn't matter. Reinforce the second cordon and fall back to the mid levels. Get everything out, and prepare…"

[ FEED LOST - STARTING NEW DECRYPTION CYCLE ]

\- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | -

Their advance into the next rooms was unopposed. Togusa retrieved a new tube of Recon BallBots from the Tachikoma's left-side Pod Supply cache, opened it and rolled the devices out onto the floor, before going left and carefully covering his corners, looking under every table and into every crevice, transopters and scanners turned up to full.

Nothing.

"Where the fuck's everyone? They can't have retreated that quickly. Athena, there aren't any alternative escape routes, right?" Batou asked, having ripped open a closet door without finding anything inside but wrapped packages, neatly stowed away.

[Confirming that, Shadow-Two. The Mass Distribution file does not show any hidden docks or surface accesses. Team Stalker has the other entrance blocked.]

Togusa lowered his carbine and took in the room before him.

Unlike the previous room, this one was less hacker den, more workshop. The devices on the tables didn't look the part of high-tech fabrication and manufacturing systems with their simple plastic-composite panels and pragmatic blocky shapes, but his ARO nearly overflowed with AR-graphics and analytical conclusions of top-of-the-line machinery, potentially fabricated in-situ by excellent mechanics, capabilities and an eye for functionality over shiny, presentable looks.

Projects had been abandoned in various states of assembly on the workbenches, though a few assembler robots were still continuing their work. "Sloppy information control, should have slagged it all", Saito remarked as he looked at one project, a heavy robotic chassis someone had been fitting electrical components into.

"It's certainly not your standard-issue bombshop", Batou agreed, gazing upon a row of Weapon Printers, each the size of a human coffin, still humming with activity. The trigraphic-holographic interface cleanly displayed the weapon being printed, and the cue of next products. "They were producing enough weaponry for an entire army here. High-end stuff as well."

The Tachikoma took sentry by the next door. " _I can see no one up to 50 meters beyond this door!_ " it announced. " _There seems to be some kind of room and then a staircase downward._ "

"Check. Let's go." Togusa shouldered his carbine again, leaving a table with various explosive devices behind, and jogged to the door, setting up on the right. He glanced at his map. The other assault teams had reached similar positions close to them, and they would be entering into the same room. "Major, we're ready."

"Copy. In three… two.. one."

The Tachikoma used its manipulator-mounted effectors to simply blast the door out of the way with a surgical application of warp field at mechanical weak points, then forced in, Togusa right behind it with his Carbine up and using the armored bulk and vehicle-grade kinetic barriers for cover.

Again, there was nothing. No trip mines set off detectors, no return fire from sentries, not even a squad of cheap GIUs.

Something clicked in Batou's head the same instant as it did with the Major, the pieces falling into place. "They're concentrating forces in…"

"...a more defensible and vital location. This up here are just workstations, the servers and storage are somewhere else, and they're trying to deny those." they said.

"Oh fuckshit, and we're taking our time." Ishikawa lobbed a tiny one-use omnitool-fabricated recon drone down the staircase. The device was blown to bits by sentry fire, only managing a single snapshot before it failed.

"Gloves off." Kusanagi broke into a rapid jog to the staircase, flinging five recon drones over the railing with both hands. This time they got a better picture, and the ARO presented a tactical snapshot of the situation downstairs.

A literal firing circle of sentries and combat robots was awaiting them, heavy machine guns, miniguns and Munitions Launchers as well as four Assault Cannons pointed at the staircase. "Bingo. Ishikawa, Shield Boost on the Tachikomas, everyone else, ECM! Over the railing and at them!"

Seven overload mines arced over the railing and into the lower level, followed by three dazzlers and the first Tachikoma, its shielding reinforced by the portable support generator on Ishikawa's backpack.

The human team stood off, at the ready at the top of the staircase, as a literal apocalypse of firepower was unleashed on the lower floor. Enemy fire punched against the outer bubble shield of the Tachikoma, which fell after a second with the kinetic bleeding field depleted and collapsing in on itself, projectors unable to compensate; but the inner, hugging shielding held, flechettes blasting themselves apart on the field in a strange vibrating sequence of bangs.

The answering fire of the GAU-920 slammed into another dual set of bubble shields by portable shield pylons - In reaction, the Tachikoma switched to Disruptor ammunition, cut through the leftmost barrier with a localized overload followed by global collapse, sawed the covering combat robots in half and then blew the generator to bits in a detonation of overloading high-powered electrical and eezonic systems.

The Tachikoma used the thus-created opening in the robots protection to launch several grenades with the dry "thump! thump! thump!" of its low-velocity gauss launcher at the top of the pod, and more explosions ripped through the lower level.

Then the GAU-920 cut back in, and a second Tachikoma dropped down besides the first, adding in its own firepower. " _Perimeter is up, Major!_ "

"Go!"

The organic team pressed down the stairs, Togusa and Ishikawa taking the lead with both their shields back up to provide cover from enemy shrapnel, using the broad staircase to descend in pairs. Saito and Borma hung back to provide fire support, and more Tachikomas jumped down in front of Togusa and Ishikawa, who were the first into the new level.

The firepower of the leading Tachikoma and the enemy emplacement strategy had left the entrance area largely in ruins. Dividing walls had been spalled and the floor paneling had been ripped away, revealing damaged structural elements, exposed electrical conduits, and a damaged gravitic generator which cut out. Togusa and Ishikawa only kept themselves moving fast using Van der Waals strips on their boots and power armor strength, collapsing their shields and half-diving, half-pushing themselves into cover in the now AR-graphically indicated 0.1 g zone. A move that paid off when more fire peppered their cover and slammed into the shields of a Tachikoma from beyond.

Then something loud _cracked_ , and a massive red glowing furrow lanced into the port armor.

"Alpha-Alpha-Romeo-Charlie!" Ishikawa cried and threw himself aside. A second later, a hypervelocity sabot slammed through his cover, ripped the lower leg off a Tachikoma, and buried itself into the floor in a massive crater and a cloud of pulverized lunacrete.

 _An Anti-Armor-Railcanno… oh shit, move Christian!_

He threw himself out of cover as fast as he could, muscles protesting the strain of the emergency-overclocked linear frame system, and felt the shockwave of a passing round through his boots. A second round punched through the wall over his head and holed the crew pod of a Tachikoma, burying itself into the wall on the other side.

[That's a Titan Armories EMR-210 with T-Ray Electroptical aiming,] Borma helpfully supplied, [stay on the move and spread out! He can only follow one target at a time.]

"Small fucking mercy!" Togusa cursed as he dived into the open, fell on the floor carbine up and burst down two OFI fighters he had incidentally flanked in his bid to outrun the Railcannon. He worked himself back up with a hand as both men dropped dead on the floor. Then he saw the muzzle of the Linac in question swing towards him, and an alarm warbled in his head. _Oh shit!_

His jetpack carried him out of the path of fire just in time. [Would someone please ensure I don't lose a leg?!]

Kusanagi double-tapped two OFI fighters on the move with her pistol, ran up a wall and pushed herself off towards the point where a heavy, HPA-suited enemy was lugging around the bulk of the EMR-210. [I'm on it!]

[ Calisto Armories Power Armor System 5, modified. Increased neck guard, heavier front armor, add-on linear frame and supportive arm for Railcannon. Slow, heavily protected. Can't turn fast. Anti-Armor Explosive Attachment device suggested. ]

A new graphic unfolded in her HUD.

[ Fabrication time: T-Minus 5 seconds. ]

 _I will reach him in three. Stall for time._

She thought-clicked her pistol to Full-Auto, and fired the rest of the thermal clip and the integrated heatsink as far as she could, smacking an enemy aside with a hit to the head that destroyed his neck.

The heavily-suited enemy swung towards her, raising his left arm and showing her the hefty weapon snapped to the HPA there. Annoyance flared in her mind. It was a goddamn Microgun, a whole four barrels, and would be murder at close range.

Her response was to drop below his line of fire, sliding on her knees, then catapult herself over his head, short-bladed omniblade scratching across his helmet but failing to penetrate. He turned around and deftly swung his long weapon after her, managing to connect and smack her into an unstable spin that ended with her impacted nearly head-first into the ground. She rolled out of it, and thus barely managed to avoid the close-range shot - which served to unbalance her enemy as he had not braced properly and forgotten to dial down the power to more manageable levels.

[ Charge ready ]

She rolled to the right, got her hands under her torso, and pushed herself up so she could catapult herself at the head of the Power armor. She managed to catch a right hand on his shoulder, ducked under the slow swipe trying to push her off…

...then he suddenly let himself fall backwards, and she got halfway crushed under the heavy weight of the power armor and the support backpack for the railcannon. Floor paneling splintered and even with combat supression online, it hurt. Teeth gritted, her right hand closed around the warm flat cylinder of the Penetrator charge, and slapped it to the side of the helmet.

It went off with a damped " _Kwomp_ " and the suit fell still.

[Railcannon is down!]

With the biggest threat neutralized, the team moved down the remaining fighters in seconds, bringing the firepower of the Tachikomas into play once again.

"Batou, Borma…"

"On it Major!" The two cyborgs grabbed the power armor by the arms and torso and lifted it off her armored body. [Thanks] She took Batou's offered hand and vaulted back to her feet.

[Stalker, your progress?]

[We've fully secured the storage level and subverted several combat robots stored there for our support, Ma'am. Ground entrances are locked down, they won't escape there.]

[Copy. Hold position. We'll begin crushing them against you.]

[Copy, we… ah fuck, hold that, we've got another breakout attempt.]

She cut the link and followed the team.

[Alright, prepare to force in…]

There was a distant muffled sound, somewhat like an explosion.

"What was that?" Togusa asked, carbine snapping up and scanning the room for any approaching danger.

[Shadow, Stalker, Athena here. I have maintenance alarms going off in Corridor 045, adjacent to you, severe cable damage on the right installations. Safety interlocks are cutting in and… Spimes just dropped off the network. I have a network cascade crash in progress, containing with some success.]

[Athena, repeat that.]

[Shadow, hurry. You have a breach in the perimeter on your floor, some 75 meters away, on the far side of the big area in front of you. And I have confirmed several humanoid targets fleeing the scene.]

[Shit! They had an alternate escape route and just blew it open!]

[Affirmative. I suggest you initiate pursuit as fast as possible, I am loosing hab-side surveillance assets, and fast. I do not know how long I will be able to successfully track them or infer their position.]

"Right, let's…"

The door hissed open, and a dozen cylinder shapes flew through with dry "thumps".

[ GRENADE! ]

 _Move!_

The world shock. Bright lights, concussion, too much sound. No sound. No up or down.

Darkness.

* * *

 **A/N** : …Ooooops.

* * *

 **Sevoris:** This time around we (that would be NickBana and myself, Sevoris) will be answering some review questions as well. Sorry it took so long to respond guys, but our primary platforms are SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity and we're still working on mirroring everything that happens there onto , and bringing the worldbuilding into a readable format (as you might have inferred, a lot has happened differently in this universe.)

In the meantime, there already exists a (Work in Progress) timeline ( _cdn. knightlab. com. /libs/ timeline3/ ?source=1SdSuCRYF8Asp2i6bzWjh_K72q-PM4U2D7ZPZGI2VQDY &font=Lustria-Lato&lang=en&initial_zoom=10&height=600_) which can serve as a basic orientation within the confines of this world.

But, without further ado, let's get onto answering some questions.

 **Nick:** For the website, I'll try to post it in my profile page. _If it works._

 **Quest-Questioner:**

" _First question:_

 _When exactly does this storyline take place, at-least if you could utilize the mass effect trilogy' time-line as a basis?"_

 **Sevoris:** Right now we are in the "Interlude years" leading up to the events of ME1. Torfan for example (In-universe also known as Operation BROKEN ANVIL) happened in 2227.

The events of ME1 might start unfolding in roundabout 6 or 7 years, in 2238-2239 A.D.

For some more orientation, First Contact happened in 2197, and humanity is an Associate Member since 2210. The Archives were discovered in the 2070s.

 _However_ , before anyone jumps on the "Moar Tech" bandwagon, the Archives here took far more time to decypher to "current-day" levels, so to speak.

" _Second question:_

 _Following the first, will we be able to catch the trilogy' events, like while all this is happening_

 _we would catch snippets of the normandy crew through short "news broadcast's"...?"_

 **NickBana:** Given that, as explained above, we are still several years away from the events of ME1, we won't see major news about the crew at this point in time. Also we kinda bumped up the date so the timeline before the event of the crossover doesn't feel rushed.

 **jerseydanielgibson**

" _I'm liking how you've written out the world (and it is one) and I like the blend of GITS/ME. The ammo block idea is a god one, and similiar to what I use in Where The Law Stands Tall, save mine aren't pre-cut but pre-sized in grams (like 5 gram slug or 7.5 gram round). I like the tech part of it, which is why I picked your story out of the cross-over sections; I'm looking for tech-exec ideas and terms, and there are so many that its easy to get lost. Like the Kiggs Fields or some of your scopes and interfaces. Like the work, and I think I'll drop some respect on my next chapter up to your stuff in payment for looking at some of your ideas and wondering what would work for mine."_

 **Sevoris** : Thank's mate!

For the term "Kiggs field", a Shout-out has to go to DigitalHelix and his story "Mass Effect: All in the details." As in his story, a Kiggs field is the human name for the atmosphere-to-space containment fields we see in Mass Effect, though the geometry is used for other purposes, such as blocking the air exchange at security checkpoints, or just keeping hot air of a terrace, as well.

Overall, whenever you see new terms like for example "Counter-mass"/"cee-eem", even if the term "eezonic" doesn't clarify it, you are still and always looking at Mass Effect technology, just a lot more detailed in its inner workings and specifics.

So yeah, there are a lot of explainable details. If you or anyone else reading this has questions, just ping us (Me, I am running around on - UserID 8255176) or leave your questions in the reviews and from this update onwards we'll work on answering them separately for . And we'll start looking into properly codifying the worldbuilding for everyone here on , starting with the already-writen worldbuilding.


	11. Knock-knock Pt 3

Motion.

[ 45 Tactical Theater Threats identified. 12 immediate threats identified. 4 threats assigned for neutralization. Engaging. ]

Light.

[ Incoming CQB Attack… Predictive actions plotted. Counteraction selected. Executing. ]

Darkness.

...he caught the fist with his hand, blocking the strike, twisted with augmented strength.

[ Threat neutralized. Engaging Threat #02 with sidearm. ]

A weapon boomed, something slammed.

Darkness.

[ Enemy #02 neutralized. Plotting engagement Enemy #03. Ballistic calculations… done. ]

Motion in the distance. Sounds, hushed yet painfully loud.

...his revolver clicked empty.

 _What the hell is going…_

His wife and children, smiling, on a meadow of Arcturus Station.

 _...on?_

[ Threat! Threat! Threat! ]

...his armored fist hit plating with a heavy thud, and the kinetic barrier "knuckles" detonated.

More flashes, pressure against his forehead.

A piercing flare of pain.

[ Compensating… ]

...the quickloader connected, and the six new sabots slipped into their chambers.

 _Hey there!_ His cheerful self was grinning at him.

 **...What?**

 _How is it going Christiaaaaaaaooooo….._ It melted away like plastics, flowing into water...

...The fresh heatsink clicked into place, and the carbine barked, the shouldered weapon swinging from target to target with machine precision, his finger pulling through the trigger smoothly.

[ Engage, Engage. Engage. ]

It was like a dream.

...Was it a dream?

It certainly felt like one…

They were storming some large room filled with server racks and workstations, and other computing equipment. Black boxes connected with various cables, racks the size of krogan or small cars. OFI fighters and combat robots were making a desperate last stand against the scorched shapes that cut them down, barriers taking their uncoordinated fire with impunity, planting visual false-flags, and outflanking them, Togusa among them. ECM and Incendiary devices whirled through the air, cryo-bursts detonated, overloads arched through the air. Machines jolted, twitched and turned, blown up, electrocuted, subverted and turned against their own masters.

He snapped back into reality.

⟨| NEURAL INTEGRITY REINSTATED |⟩  
❮ Transferring Shell Operations to Primary Ego ❯

With a stumble, he fell on his face. A minor burst of pain flared in his head, and suddenly he realized just how shitty he felt. His entire body was bruised and felt inflamed; warm spots biting like ants on his skin indicated curing medigel patches.

He rolled around and brought his arms up to cradle his head instinctively. The arm that came up was scorched and deep furrows marred it, as if someone had thrown him into a fire and then sandblasted him.

 _...Why would that…_

Something clicked, and he felt the calm water of his implant net pouring back in, cognitive processes speeding up. The grenades the OFIF had fired through the door as the opening moves of their last breakout attempt, a bid to buy whoever was escaping as much time as possible.

He had just suffered what Power Armor operators called "being a Lobster" - cooking inside the shell of your Power Armor, far more resilient than yourself. The full-body armor plating and trinary barrier system had caught most of the shrapnel and neutralized the plasma, but it could only do so much about the shockwave. First the cut-offs had snapped in and isolated Togusa from the massive sound and brilliant light of the detonations; then his shell had tried to protect him. Togusa's brain was encased in a milspec-grade braincase, an update he had been given when he entered Section 9, but in the vector chaos that multiple detonations easily caused, the control system of the tiny inertial unit installed in the braincase had simply failed to account for every vector, and his brain had been accelerated inside the braincase, causing him to black out and suffer neural failures, and probably suffering some minor damage as well.

With him out of the game, the automated systems had cut in, and an AI riding in his PAN for just this purpose had slipped into suddenly vacated gloves and driven him like a puppet while his medical systems worked on kitting his brain and body back together.

 _I just survived several grenades at close range. Fuuuuck…._

He gritted his teeth and stood up, letting his implants compensate as his brain worked itself back into full working order.

"Right, what now?" He paused, thought for a moment. "Right, stay here, secure the evidence, hold this room.

"Ishikawa, how's it looking?", he asked as he joined the infowarfare expert.

"They've got a wiping program running! Get moving and disconnect those servers. Pull the drives, rip out the blades, whatever, don't let the flashing complete!"

"Fuck!" Raven had just done the first, and dropped the 3.5" holographic storage device which had just burst into flames. "They're rigged! This one at least!"

"Cut the power!" Ishikawa said and pulled a simple handle from his backpack, unfolding the base of the omnicutter with a flick.

"Where?" Togusa asked as he procured his device.

His HUD filled with indicators of power cables, then the massive overlay compressed down into six marked points highlighted with thick yellow boxes, and bracketed three of them orange.

Ishikawa thumped his omnicutter into a simple sharp axe, the device humming to live, and hacked the first bundle of thick power cables in half smoothly. One column of servers… didn't fall silent. "They got UPS!"

"Pull it, pull it, pull it!", Ishikawa shouted and ran for the next strand.

Raven simply ripped the UPS out of their slots without fanfare, the heavy power storage devices slamming into work islands and the floor as she went to work.

Togusa hacked his first power line in half - mercifully, this server fell silent immediately. "No UPS on this one!"

"Okay!"

Another cable stack was cleaved apart. Sparks flew on this one, and Ishikawa simply resorted to shooting the actual UPS in their casings to buy himself time. Behind him, Raven ripped the units out, and he hacked the first strand apart with two quick strokes.

Then he ran to Togusa's side and began pulling the units there.

After 10 more seconds, the room was strangely silent, with no whirr of coolers or the beeps of the servers they had just shut down the hard way. Ishikawa took a deep breath and gazed at a clock on his HUD which had stopped counting down. 25 more seconds to a total data purge. "Shit. That was close."

He dropped into one of the interface chairs and actually popped his faceplate, using an armored hand to swipe across his face before he noticed the residues of soot it was leaving on his sweat-soaked skin. He slammed his faceplate back down and turned to the still-running workstation, retrieving a simple datastick from an armored pocket, and dropping it on the interface-enabled surface, where it produced a circular graphic. "Right. Let's see what we can still get."

* * *

Kusanagi, Batou, Saito and Borma had taken up the pursuit even before the last OFI fighter had fallen, aggressively pressing forward and parting the defense in their wake, leaving wrecked Shells and Robots behind.

She dove through the doorway in an aggressive combat roll that would allow her to cover the sides of the door without getting herself shot, found nothing in her sights, then flipped around and started running again. Ahead, a charge similar to their ETDD had blasted a human-wide entrance clean through a thin layer of rock and the tunnel wall. The corridor was still filled with hot steam and her environmental sensors warbled warnings about free cooling fluid.

A big AR-graphic arrow pointed right, and she followed it. Up ahead, a foot just vanished around the corner. She didn't even bother bringing the carbine up, stowing it on her Smartpack and drawing a pistol as she sped up, running after the fleeing OFIF members as quickly as she could.

The first obstacle was a proximity mine one fighter up ahead had dropped almost right around the corner. She shot the fuse apart with two precise shots, then fired several times after the fleeing men. A kinetic barrier absorbed each shot, and she ejected the heatsink, slapped in a fresh one from a dispenser unit on her chestplate.

Then the men vanished through a bulkhead, and slammed it shut. It locked with a beep and a visible red flash around the outer ring.

"Batou!"

She jumped aside, allowing him to pass. The huge cyborg rammed through the pressure door with a thruster-assisted charge; the 700 kilos of armored cyborg with a kinetic barrier up front and high velocity ripping the composite alloy panel out of its seal. The next door two meters behind had more resistance, but not nearly enough.

Another prox-mine exploded.

Batou emerged unscathed and opened fire of his own, using an arm-mounted SMG to hose down the fleeing men before they vanished around a corner.

[Those fuckers are fast!]

[Stay on 'em!]

They turned left, turned right, then stormed out of the tunnel and into a larger cavern filled with loud machinery. Evidently this section was part of the heat management system of the habitat, with the quadruple kiggs field airlocks, massive warning signs for toxic substances, alternating warnings of extreme heat or extreme cold everywhere, and the heavily insulated pipes. The environmental readouts also jumped upwards, and the noise of massive pumps was deafening. [Hold your fire!] No sense risking a shootout in here, where highly pressurized, either near-cryogenic or extreme hot and gaseous coolant would leak from any damage they could do to the machinery with just a single shot.

Their charges at least, had the same sensibility not to drop prox mines or open fire backwards. Their passage was easily tracked however; the loud noise of booted feet on metal catwalk a high-frequency banging in the low-frequency sea of noise.

Saito launched six tiny fly drones from his left gauntlet, the recon drones buzzing into the air. They had left the recon perimeter of the main group long ago, and had not seeded a new swarm to provide them with forward intel.

"Got eyes on", Saito reported. Four orange human outlines appeared through the heat haze produced by the machinery. "They've reached the far side of the room."

"What's beyond?", Kusanagi queried the Ops AI.

[ Fluid Utility Storage and Loading. This includes a loading avenue for tanks towards the spacecraft docks.]

"That's their goal. Everyone, to the right! Let's intercept them through another connector tunnel!"

They turned right, running towards the second connector tunnel that dug through solid rock and underneath several larger tunnels and rooms, the doors hissing open as the Ops AI predictively cleared their way. A yellow maintenance bot shot out at velocity to make way for them, and they entered the tunnel proper, lightstrips blurring as Kusanagi picked up speed in the higher gravity.

Ahead, there was the loud screeching of wheels on polymer floor. [Shadow-Six, I tried delaying them with an empty loader. Semi-successful. They have at least one hacker and all have Class-IV Augments in their legs.]

[Check, Athena. Tell the Captain to warm the engines. I do not want these bogeys escaping!]

[Copy. You will close with them to around 15 meters.]

On cue, four human shells raced as fast as they could from left to right in front of them.

"I see them!" She picked up speed in the open space of the room, using thrusters to keep herself steady as she rounded the corner and pelted down after the men along the larger loading tunnel.

[ Distance to Docks: 500 meters. ]

[This is gonna be tight...]

The four running shapes were coming closer and closer. She calculated engagment options.

[ Arm-mounted engagement options non-viable. Shoulder-mounted forward-launching options only viable option; no engagement clearance for backpack mounts, too high speed. No effective munitions in forward-launching shoulder mounts. ]

The four targeting boxes on her HUD turned into crossed-out boxes.

❮ No viable engagement ❯

Frustration flared, and she pushed herself further, bringing the prosthetics to the "yellow line" of enhanced performance. The hostiles rounded a corner.

[MAJOR, YOU HAVE INCOMING!]

Large red shapes appeared on her HUD, showing her…

[ Combat Acceleration x12 ]

….Several heavy-duty war robots, including a Salarian IVGV-952 Kasarvvir War Mech. Her exocortex helpfully supplied details.

 _Hexaped. Designed for urban warfare. Full environment Surround Sensor Suite. CQB Vector Field Defenses. Heavy-duty barriers designed to resist not only weapons fire but explosions and heavy debris up to several tons as well.  
PTVXR-54Q Rotary Mass Driver. 15mm, Mach 22 firing velocity. Secondary Munitions Launcher system, four secondary turrets with rotary shotguns with Shot/Slug capability. Close-In Claymore Defense System.  
Designed to kill krogan during the rebellions and updated ever since. Very good track record in Anti-Cyborg Usage._

[COVER!]

She broke her run as hard as she could, finding some grip on the polymer floor, and threw herself into the cover of a thick structural archway. The first burst of 15mm flechettes from the Kararvvir narrowly missed her, hammering into the structural archway, chipping it away.

❮ Cover viability T- 00:02:0652 ❯

[Athena, I don't care how you do it, just do it!]

She slammed combat cybernetics into full boost, focused her attention to slamming a barrage of cyberattacks into the Kararvvir for two seconds, forcing it to assign just that one flop more to its own defenses instead of attacking her, and switched cover.

A round hit her in the leg, and alarms went off, her left lower leg lighting up red, then turning grey on the diagnostic schematic. All feeling from the area cut off.

"Chikushō!"

She managed to make cover just so, trailing CF fluid and nanorepair paste all the way. [Party Crasher, roll out and deploy! Get these fuckers off our backs!]

[Rolling out now.]

She ducked deeper into her cover, and reached for the M-96 Mattock-RH she had compacted as a backup to her carbine on her back for the eventuality. If those fuckers were going to kill her, she'd lose her Shell fighting.

"They're advancing!" Saito remarked as he fitted together his Titan Armories EMR-400SRS, connecting the pieces of the main unit and the long barrel it had been stowed as in his backpack.

"You think?!" Batou asked sarcastically as he removed any safeties on the railgun module and fired as fast as the weapon feasibly could in redlined mode. Each shot thundered in the tunnel, the sound as loud as the PTVXR-54Q - and he ran dry after two shots. "Reloading!" Batou stepped back into cover just in time as a heavy burst of fire slammed into his position, retrieving another magazine with six railgun sabots from a pouch as he ejected the empty magazine with an off-hand motion of his weapon and a mental command.

On the other side, Borma was laying down a thick field of fire with his portable MMG, and actually downed first one, then another of the War Robots with focussed barrages that walked the available targets and forced them to slow down, getting into cover to actively vent the massive heatsink unit under the barrel and allow his barrier capacitors to recharge. [We're pinned, and in 2 minutes they're gonna scrap the Major,] he concluded. [My weapon's not going through that Heavy without him pulping me before I down his barriers.]

[Just… keep them suppressed. Party Crasher is rolling out, and they have the weaponry to take those... _**bastards**_ down.]

"Major, are you okay?"

[NO?!]

Batou flinched. She was having one of her episodes. And it was a stupid question.

[Party crasher, ETA?]

[Vanguard is off the boat, Shadow-Six, main force close behind. One minute out.]

[Hurry!]

[Roger]. The voice of the bioroid was ice-cold and collected.

Saito joined in by leaning out of his cover and firing into the joints of one of the warbots. His own 10mm Disruptor Pulsar Sabot managed to punch through the barrier and into the hip joint of one, and the machine fired wildly as it fell.

Two more rapid shots into its head, and another into its right arm fixed that - only for the machine to use instructions from some other robot to grab its weapon with the left, steady it, and commence firing once again. "Now that's the good stuff!" Saito wheezed as he threw himself back into cover, kinetic barriers deflecting shots.

"Very funny." Batou got one shot off before he had to throw himself back into cover. "Major, you still there?"

"Yes."

"Oh, good. Could you stay that way?"

"Maybe."

Batou snorted, and fired the railgun twice again in rapid succession before switching back to the LMG and his armor-piercing rounds.

[Party Crasher, Drone Perimeter Contact with enemy units. Indirect fire capability in 5 seconds.]

"About fucking time." Batou blew the entire magazine of his seeker launcher dry, only to see it shatter against interlocked kinetic barriers without much of an effect.

[Party Crasher 4-1, Fox Five, Fox Five, Fox Five!]

[Party Crasher 4-2, Fox Five, Fox Five, Fox Five!]

The Drone Missile barrage arrived with the screech of rocket engines, diving around the corner, a veritable swarm of mutant super hornets diving down onto their enemies. Defense lasers flashed brightly and some missiles died; more were stopped cold by kinetic barriers.

Enough got through.

The barrage was devastating, around half of the war robots falling in a single second of high-explosive firepower. The rest turned around, the new avenue of the threat obvious - just in time for Party Crasher to arrive.

The Section 9 Strike team of two Poseidon Biotech bioroid Commando Fireteams, another eight Tachikomas in their HAV-chassis variant, and four Boston-Akamashu SFCS-1X squads fell onto the robots like an invisible fist of god under their thermoptic camouflage, heavy ECM masking their positions as their own mobile nodes launched a renewed cyberwarfare attack onto the enemy platforms.

They weathered the return fire without flinching, heavy gatlings cutting down war robots and bioroids, but the attrition rate was squarely in Section 9's favor.

After seven seconds, the guns fell silent, and the bioroids moved to take care of their wounded and dead with the same efficiency they had applied to their soldiering, applying Medigel and bandages, removing armor plating, all in total silence.

Two medics headed for the Major and Batou, who was kneeling next to her and taking a look at the leg damage using his omnitool transopter. "Ma'am", the left said, "we've got a mobile field unit with us. Let's get you out of the shell suit and that damage repaired."

Kusanagi nodded. "Agreed." She keyed her com. " _Huginn_ Actual, they slipped away. I really hope you got eyes on their shuttle."

[Affirmative, Shadow-Six. _Huginn_ has a talley on the enemy shuttle, and we are moving to intercept.]

"Captain, whatever carrier they dock with - do _not_ allow it to escape. Interdict, disable and board _aggressively_. How copy?"

[Solid copy. _Huginn_ is moving to interdict, disable and board.]

* * *

For Captain Jonathan Steward, CO of CSQB/IIS-161 SSV _Huginn_ , the day had been pretty uneventful so far, only filled with the regular rigor of covert military spaceflight. For the time being he had been perfectly fine with playing support mothership for the operation on the asteroid, circling it while pretending to be an innocent civilian vessel on a visit at Cedatis Station.

Then the breakout had happened, and Steward had started to get a sinking feeling in his gut.

Then the Ops AI opened a Com.

[Sir, I regret to inform you that the four enemy Tangos have slipped their pursuers and are boarding a shuttle for emergency departure. They were granted immediate clearance. Feed is on the glass.]

The central point of the Ops Vir for Steward was a massive virtual trigraphic battlespace graphic, currently filled with the bulk of Cedatis station and the traffic around it. Now the trigraphic expanded and zoomed in, highlighting a yellow render of an STS-42 Shuttle that was dropping out of a docking bay, RCS thrusters firing. "And there it goes," he murmured.

He turned to his CO, Alena Davidson, who was sitting in her own chair. "XO, Set Condition SS-1. Mr. Fan, prepare Synchronicity Event, and wake the Warminds. I think we're about to go to battle."

"Aye Sir." Chief Neurotech Officer Fan Xiaoming replied and opened his own configurations. "Prepare for switchover to SS-1 Mode on Shift neural links."

The ship wide automated announcement on the 1MC began: "All hands, set condition SS-1. All hands, set condition SS-1. Secure your stations for acceleration and vacuum exposure immediately. Set Condition SS-1, secure your stations for acceleration and vacuum exposure immediately."

A new connection opened with a chirp, coming from the ops team and their commander, Major Motoko Kusanagi: [ _Huginn_ Actual, they slipped away. I really hope you got eyes on their shuttle.]

"Affirmative, Shadow-Six. _Huginn_ has a talley on the enemy shuttle, and we are moving to intercept."

[Captain, whatever carrier they dock with - do _not_ allow it to escape. Interdict, disable and board _aggressively_. How copy?]

"Solid copy. _Huginn_ is moving to interdict, disable and board."

Stewards thought-clicked the Battlespace graphic to an overview, and threw the predicted plots and likely intercepts for the enemy shuttle onto it. Bogey-Parasite 1 was likely heading for an intercept with a group of 600-meter craft. One among them stood out as blocky but still… rather aerodynamic.

[Stand-by SS-1 mode. Bandwidths are opening, War AIs are seeded and initialized, feeding tactical picture], Fan reported. [Tactical Fusion in ten seconds… mark.]

[All Stations, this is the Captain. SSV Huginn has acquired and tracked an enemy parasite bogey heading for a ride out of here. We will not allow them. We are moving to intercept and disable their mothership at this time. That is all. See you in the Warmind.]

[Initializing in 5… 4… 3… 2.. 1.]

As SSV Huginn lit up its engines and descended upon the shuttle and the cluster of starships like a bird of prey, spreading thermal radiator wings, its crew too transformed. Isolated minds, trapped within the confines of their own Egos, expanded, connected, intertwined and melded. Personalities flowed away, personal memories temporarily extinguished, brain activities modulated.

And in their place and out of them, the Warmind of Huginn grew, the wrathful raven of Odin descending upon its prey.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** Heh. heh. heh. Did you really think a few grenades at close range could terminate a military transhuman, even if he isn't a full-body cyborg, in this day and age? You are mistaken.  
Oh, also, Space battle ahead.

A shoutout goes to Hobb's Tuna and his story "The Cross of Iron", which inspired the modern spacecraft control system employed by SA military spacecraft - The minds of its crew and AI, merged into one through the power of modern Cognotech.


	12. Two Ravens Pt 1

In spaceflight, a "cold separation" was a rare occurrence. Everyone tried to ignite their fusion reactors on-station, where one could draw on the purposefully constructed banks of ultracap arrays ready to provide the jolt for this specific purpose, conserving onboard ignition resources for emergency use.

But when you wanted to separate fast it was a viable option. Fusion reactors were always designed to be ignitable in the field, between dedicated ultracap arrays and backup fission piles (commonly gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors), and close to a station the sheer power output and plasma of a fusion reactor wasn't needed anyway; an MEDC could run off the Ultracaps for a few minutes, and cold-plasma maneuvering thrusters were similarly not particularly energy-hungry devices.

Withdrawing from the reach of the station assault, the crew and passengers of STS-42 ETRRF-985412 _Belle Voyage XXIV_ relaxed, leaning back in their acceleration chairs, the pilot AI turning the craft around and burning for a rapid rendezvous with their mothership, only a few hundred kilometers distant.

Unfortunately for them, _Huginn_ had them in its sights already. The Ops AIs had encountered no problems with pulling the entire registry of the shuttle from under the nose of the OFIF-sympathetic traffic controller, and while they could not block his order due to safety interlocks, getting ID and vector from Cedatis Station Approach was easier.

The deviant thermal signature produced by the shuttle, byproduct of its cold fusion reactor, was the dead give-away that differentiated the shuttle from its peers.

 _Huginn_ initiated pursuit stealthily, firing its powerful primary RCS plasma thrusters to begin phasing its orbit; as the apogee fell relative to Cedatis Station, _Huginn_ seemed to "pick up" speed relative to its unknowing target, publicly squawking that it was adjusting its parking orbit around Cedatis Station in preparation for eventual departure on the dedicated subchannel of its transponder. The other traffic AIs noticed, found no conflicts, and approved silently, some messaging acknowledgements.

As soon as approach LADARs lighting up between STS-42 _Belle Voyage XXIV_ and a 600-meter, 45 million tons Boeing DSCV-400 freighter with the hull number MKUUT-8500299 identifying as SCAS _Oliver_ , _Huginn_ knew its target. Tactical Analysis confirmed as _Huginn_ 's civilian navigational LADAR and the transponders of _Belle Voyage XXIV_ confirmed the transfer shuttle was indeed coming in for a zero-zero intercept and a docking maneuver. At the same time, SCAS _Oliver_ squawked its intention to engage a transfer vector for eventual departure into FTL.

《 _Designate Contact 00851 as Bandit-01. Prepare to interdict._ 》

《 _Engagement mode: Offensive. Military power: Engaged. Deploying Systems..._ 》

 _Huginn_ ramped up its onboard fusion reactors to combat power and extended the booms of its droplet radiators, hull plating shifting aside to reveal military systems telescoping to level with the outer hull.

As military-grade barriers snapped into place and the radiators began cycling hot, _Huginn_ announced its intentions with a scream of ECM and the stabbing fingers of military LIDAR. The game was on.

* * *

 **= Chapter 3 - "Two Ravens" =**

 **-| May 17th, 2232 |**

* * *

As soon as the sensor AIs alerted the bridge crew of SCAS _Oliver_ to the commotion behind them and the blinding power of military LIDAR, its captain made the snap decision to accelerate with the shuttle only halfway retrieved, just captured using the external arms of the parasite craft bay.

Security alarms protested, and were silenced with switchover to military capabilities. Cranking up its globular cee-eem and lighting the fusion engines at 0.5g in-field acceleration, SCAS _Oliver_ began to burn clear of Cedatis Station, ignoring the sudden protests by the traffic management AIs and the flight controls of other spacecraft alike, official overrides to seize acceleration and limit velocity failing at suddenly existing bypasses.

 _Huginn_ fell behind as it limited its own acceleration to somewhat safe levels, only burning as hard as it reasonably could without endangering other flights within the tightly packed sphere of parking orbitals. The Warmind accepted this fact; time and tech were on its side. Once _Huginn_ had burned clear of the inner parking sphere, it would be able to accelerate with heavier mass suppression and deploy its AKVs, nailing down SCAS _Oliver_ sidereal-side and able to catch up without burning half the traffic behind it out of the sky with the military-grade main propulsion systems.

As such, SCAS _Oliver_ drew ahead, cranking up its magcoil-boosted fusion engines to 5g in-field acceleration and effective acceleration under cee-eem field to 50g. The crew breathed small, mental sighs of relief - It seemed their pursuers weren't willing to haphazardly disregard the rules of safe spaceflight just to catch them.

+United Aerospace Technologies Type-47 Raider Autonomous Kill Vehicle / Deployment Sequence Initiate… Checking Systems+

Inside _Huginn_ 's largest magazine, eight vehicles woke from electronic slumber, restrained inside total darkness inside a web of restraint platforms. They had been tended to by swarms of maintenance robots checking and replacing components that had broken down inside the cold vacuum of the outer hull outside of the pressure body, endured the G-forces tugging at them as Huginn accelerated through space on its missions. Their systems had been silent, cooled below 0°C by inactivity, with only the kindling cores of the nuclear piles and stand-by computer cores flickering as flames in the darkness.

As power surged through superconductive feeds and into drained ultracapacitors, like sleeping dragons, they roused from their rest. System after system flickered alive as computer cores powered up and linked into the intranet, heating mats coming alive to warm up components to functional temperatures. Isolated pipes croaked as slush hydrogen and De-He3 mix coursed through them to fill fuel and remass tanks for duty, and inside dual torri coils and masers hummed as they began heating deuterium-helium 3 gas to millions of degrees and compress it to thousands of bars of pressure.

+Power… check+

With independent power flowing through the superconductive power grid and into the central ultracapacitors, more systems woke. The Thermal Management System began pumping chilled lithium around heating components and into the support feeds from Huginn, the Mass Effect Drive Cores and Field Generators cycled into readiness, and weapon systems were dry-fired.

+Thermal Systems… check+

+Mass Effect Systems… check+

+Weapons… check+

+Stand-by to receive munitions…+

Bays opened as new arms delivered Space-to-Space Missiles and feeds with Mass Driver ammunition, setting them into place.

+Ammunition Load confirmed+

+Special Missions Module loading…+

Two more set of arms and one massive cradle, gliding on magnetic rails along the ceiling and bottom of the AKV hangars, delivered two flat attachment modules; all eight AKVs opening armored hatches at their broad sides to expose mechanical attachment points. The SMMs were settled into place and secured.

+Initiating AI control; Handover from SIOS complete+

Eight digital minds booted and began receiving instructions from the Warmind congruence aboard _Huginn_ , the assigned AKV operators downloading mission briefings, situation files and Reaction Options into the AIs, which assimilated them at machine speeds.

+Ready to deploy+

Clearing the shell of the inner parking orbits, _Huginn_ throttled up its own engines, revealing the power of its four Rolls Royce-Lockheed Aerospace EFAD-40X Kairon engines. It sped after the receding engine flares of SCAS _Oliver_ , throttling up further and further as it went, drawing kilometer-long trails of hot engine plasma after itself, a new star in the night sky of Cedatis Station. By now the parking orbitals were in uproar, everyone trying to evade the hot mess and radiation zones generated by two sets of drives operating in deep-space propulsion mode, the traffic control AIs tasked to capacity as they tried coordinating new orbitals without spacecraft scorching each other or colliding in the dense parking orbitals which took ill to disruption as that caused by the two spacecraft hurling away into darkness.

Aboard SCAS _Oliver_ , the crew prepared for the drop into FTL with barely 20,000 kilometers of clearance.

Behind it, _Huginn_ played its first card.

《 _Deploying AKV Flight_ Raider. _Separation underway_. 》

On the central body of Huginn, four plates of ablative armor telescoped inwards and slid away to reveal the first four AKVs, pylons folded to their squared bodies, loaded into the launchers. Magnetic coils flexed and pushed the first four AKVs out. Huginn fired its RCS, rotating, then ejected the second half of Raider Flight into space.

+Separation complete+

Raider-01 unfolded its four maneuvering pylons and the attached "wings" of thermal radiators away from their storage positions flush with the hull, then powered its CM and shot away on dual antimatter-catalyzed fusion drives, accelerating away with thousands of outfield g. In a single second, it and its eight brethren were nothing more than blue stars against the backdrop of space, racing after SCAS _Oliver_ 15,000 kilometers away.

On the bridge of the _Oliver_ , the second helm officer began the jump: "Beginning FTL plotting. Charging MEFGs. Stand-by for drop…" Ahead of SCAS _Oliver_ , the navigational sensors began testing local space, powerful LIDARs scanning ahead for obstructions in the planned FTL path.

"Hornet! Hornet!", a sensor operator shouted, "We have eight AKVs in the black, closing… uh, negative, breaking away, no direct intercepts…"

+Establishing Interdiction Sphere at 2000 kilometers stand-off+

The eight AKVs curved their flightpaths, rotating and thrusting in maneuvers unseen inside an atmosphere, negating and adding vector with burns of their mains and maneuvering thrusters and pulses of heavy mass suppression, flinging themselves about.

Then all eight powered their Special Mission Modules, and SCAS _Oliver_ 's escape route slammed shut.

"Roadblock, Roadblock, we have Interdiction Jammers!"

With the navigational sensors thoroughly jammed, the FTL plotter's safety systems activated and locked out the jump; unable to assess the local space ahead of SCAS Oliver and getting conflicting reports of objects within the departure vector, the system simply denied the activation of the FTL Field Generators.

And behind them, _Huginn_ was closing, vectoring its thrust to pull over "above" SCAS Oliver and force down for a zero-zero intercept ahead of its psoition.

The communication system opened with a general call on UHF: "MKUUT-8500299 SCAS _Oliver_ , this is SSV _Huginn_. You have been interdicted. Shut down all drives immediately and go to zero thrust; power down your main reactors and drive core without delay. Hold your orientation and prepare for zero-zero intercept and boarding. "

SCAS _Oliver_ 's reaction was to cut out its main, fire up the retro thrusters, and try to rapidly change vector, rotating around, bleeding velocity off its existing vector rapidly, then entering an almost lateral new vector and accelerating anew. For a second the Plotter began computing the course again, then it locked out as the AKVs reacted and changed their own vectors, refocussing the ECM emitters of their Special Mission Modules.

"I repeat. SCAS _Oliver_. You have been interdicted. Shut down all drives immediately and go to zero thrust; disable your main reactors and power down your drive core without delay. Hold your orientation and prepare for zero-zero intercept and boarding. This is your second warning."

 _Huginn_ "banked" smoothly on sideburner drives, flaring its mains and the cee-eem field, changing vector easier using its military-grade propulsion suite, matching the new vector and angling in for a high fly-by before coming around for the new zero-zero intercept.

"SCAS _Oliver_ , comply with our instructions. This is your third warning."

The pursued craft banked anew, desperately skew-flipping under thrust, trying to make the AKVs overshoot - a hasty maneuver not thought through, as _Huginn_ simply closed the hole in the jamming emissions with its own systems as the AKVs skew-flipped on their own and switched on their antimatter "afterburners", main drive flames flaring and heat radiators burning, forcing the AI-driven vehicles onto new trajectories.

《 _Warning Shot. Computing Firing Solution… Done. Executing Firing Mission… 3… 2.. 1._ 》

A single off-angle shot raced from _Huginn_ 's main co-axial mass driver. The 0.03 cee 1 kg projectile zorched across the bow of SCAS Oliver with barely 200 kilometers stand-off at its closest point. Had the shot been placed even one micro-degree further left, the 10-kiloton kinetic energy of the small projectile would have opened up the bow of SCAS _Oliver_.

Finally, the com connection from SCAS Oliver opened from the other side: "You damn Inners want to play? Happy to oblige!"

The _Oliver_ suddenly whirled around, far faster than before, and a barrage of shots slammed out at 0.01c, intercepting Raider-03 and blowing the AKV apart in a barrage of 15-kiloton impacts. At the close distance, the AKV had no chance to evade the cloud of projectiles, its barriers overloading on the first connecting shot.

"SCAS _Oliver_ , this was your final warning. You will be engaged with mission-killing force."

"Go ahead, try it!", the spiteful answer came back in the same instant as the forward surfaces of _Huginn_ spit a cloud of Anti-Ship Plasma Missiles into space, angling away from their launching craft, then coming around to box in the Oliver from all sides.

Long-range GARDIAN lasers reached out and picked one, two, five missiles out of the black; each one detonating in flashes of failing ultracaps which would have pumped the plasma warhead. Then more lasers joined the interceptor fire as the missiles closed in, blasting them apart one after another.

《 _Missile Swarm 01: 26 Missiles remaining._ 》

The missiles angled down onto the maneuvering _Oliver_ , angling for its largest aspect and the engineering areas and reactors at the end of the craft.

《 _Missile Swarm 01: 14 Missiles remaining. 12 Remaining. 9...8 remaining._ 》

The four missiles which managed to breach through the inner GARDIAN zone and its dozens of emitter turrets blew themselves apart on the kinetic barriers guarding the engineering area and fusion drives.

《 _Prepare_ Harpy _Flight for Separation. Moving for close engagement._ 》

The _Oliver_ blew another AKV, Raider-08, into the flashing oblivion of antimatter containment loss, ejecting glowing debris and clouds of excited hydrogen everywhere in a cloud of glowing streaks and cooling white-blue particles, flipping and turning as it tried to aaquire another AKV, the swarm reacting with complex evasive action to the enemy fire.

SSV _Huginn_ passed the 8,000 kilometer mark.

《 _Fire Mission - Locked. Execute_. 》

The main accelerator barked at full military power, flinging 20-kilo heavy-duty sabots at 0.02cee, the pressure hull filling with the sound of capacitors discharging and the massive accelerator recoiling inside its cradle, the counter impulse engine at the back pulsing to offset the kinetic impulse the shots were transmitting.

SCAS _Oliver_ twisted through some of the shots, deflected others with its long-range, more powerful GARDIAN lasers, took what managed to bypass both with its kinetic barriers, and maneuvered to keep its distance and acquire another killshot on the maneuvering AKVs.

Raider Flight was now stuck in a massive dilemma. Upholding the jamming corridor required the AKVs to hold a line of sight with the bow of the ship, so they could angle their precisely modulated and shaped beams towards the navigational sensors. It also placed them in a far faster fire mission envelope that was harder to avoid and predict. Evasive jinking was only possible for so long and tasking the available heat capacity to keep the MEDC and the Field Generators cooled and powered at high output levels. They could have increased the distance and made it harder for the _Oliver_ to target Raider Flight, but that would also have made it harder for themselves to maintain the jamming that kept the craft pinned in STL. At the same time, the closer approach was overheating them, slowly but steadily reducing their capability to maneuver, defend themselves, and generally stay operable.

In short, and in agreement between Raider Flight's control AI and the Warmind congruence aboard _Huginn_ , they were working on limited time. They were ablative armor, giving _Huginn_ the time it would need to close, blast apart the enemy protection, and neutralize it.

《 _Projected time to enemy FTL Disengage: 3 minutes_ 》

The Warmind accepted it with cold, calculating intellect.

3 minutes was more than enough time.

 _Huginn_ pressed in, launching more missiles to box in the _Oliver_ , limiting its maneuvering options as HVMs screamed past it, denying vectors, and slowly forcing the _Oliver_ into thermal overload. Already, analysis of the GARDIAN returns showed the infrared and green lasers starting to break up, losing coherency as their generators and emitters heated up.

The main co-ax fired again on burst mode, more shots connecting with SCAS _Oliver_ as the distance between the two decreased despite the former's efforts, the ventral barrier flashing brighter. The kinetic barrier was starting to lose coherency, the field generators being strained, thirsting for power that could only be supplied so quickly. _Huginn_ was cracking open SCAS _Oliver_ 's protective shell.

Which was the perfect moment for Murphy to join the party and tap everyone on the shoulder.

《 _Aspect change on Bandit-01 - Analysing..._ 》

On SCAS _Oliver_ 's ventral surface, a pod cracked open, and the Haliat Armories Particle Beam cannon rotated on its mount, angling to follow Raider-6. One second later, a 8-kiloton kinetic beam blasted the AKV out of the sky when it hit the engine.

Then the craft fired a barrage of missiles from ventral and dorsal VLS cells which revealed themselves under folding armor doors, and _Huginn_ 's own GARDIAN suite flashed as it worked to intercept the swarm, all the while losing another AKV, with two forced into evasive action and out of the jamming sphere.

One more shot from SCAS _Oliver_ 's own co-axial, and another Raider blew itself to heat death.

《 _Separating_ Harpy _Flight_ 》

 _Huginn_ deployed its last 8 AKVs, and locked torpedoes at 4600 kilometers. Serial escalation, one card after the next.

Counter-missile missiles spewed from turreted box launchers on SCAS _Oliver_ 's forward nose section, and space filled with missile contrails as the attacking swarm from _Huginn_ went evasive, laser beams slashing in between drive contrails, blinding, damaging and destroying missiles; ECM hacked through space from the other side, confusing counter-missiles and their interceptor sub-munitions, feeding them false contacts detonation orders and disrupting their cohesion.

Cold fire bloomed in the darkness of space.

Disruptor torpedoes raced through the detonation residue, parting hot gases in their wake, descending upon SCAS _Oliver_. GARDIAN lasers locked, fired; kinetic defense cannons joined them, firing miniscule slugs at extreme velocities, laying down fields of non-viable vectors.

Again, the majority of the missiles and torpedoes did not manage to connect with their target.

But three torpedoes came through, and Disruptor Pulsars detonated with blue flashes of photon fields, kinetic barrier fields flaring up, suddenly livid like a thrashing storm see.

Then the first shell from _Huginn_ bore down, punched through the depleted KB fields, and broke itself on the armor, merely a 1 kiloton impact.

In response, SCAS _Oliver_ turned around to face _Huginn_ nose-on, and cut loose with a full weapon release.

A barrage of missiles burst forth from every single cell array on the surface, hunting for half of the remaining AKVs and _Huginn_ alike, a series of torpedoes close behind. Then the main co-ax linac cut loose, and did not stop firing, one shot after the next, a bright muzzle flash every second, 20-kiloton shells hunting for SSV Huginn. GARDIAN flashed, sideburners lighting up to push the Huginn away while keeping its nose locked onto its target, counter-missiles and interceptor drones flying from rotary launchers, flung into space on centripetal force. A rippling wall of fire approached _Huginn_ , slammed into its barriers; then the barrage arrived, and alarms wailed on _Huginn_ , its barrier desperately flashing to deflect and absorb each shattering impact.

And just as suddenly, the playing field was leveled once again.

SCAS _Oliver_ turned around, faced the now-open breach in the AKV jamming sphere, and engaged its plotter again, countdown racing to disengage…

A flash of blue, and a trio of bright blue stars appeared in the night sky, offset from the Battlespace.

[Sorry to be late to the party! SSV _Munnin_ , Influx successful, Target Bandit-01 acquired. Moving to engage.]

The second raven flashed into sidereal space at 150,00 kilometers and approached at C-fractional speeds, its three retro engines burning to illuminate the three obsidian-black faces of a _Philosopher_ -class cruiser, turrets deployed and gun ports open, approaching the battlefield.

* * *

 **Technology** **/** **Space Combat**

 **GARDIAN**

The General ARea Defense Integration Anti-spacecraft Network is the integrated hardkill interception system of a military spacecraft. Consisting of a network of interception-dedicated weapon systems ranging from long-range lasers and particle cannons and projectors to short-range kinetic cannons, "sandcasters" and "Shrapnel cannons", the GARDIAN provides active interception for numerous threats, ranging from projectiles to missiles to torpedoes and, at close ranges (below a few thousands of kilometers), other warships.

Lasers are the mainstay defensive systems of the GARDIAN; projected through a selection of emitter turrets mounted on the warships outer hull, these lasers can engage at up to thousands (and even ten thousands) of kilometers with the largest emitter units, which can maintain laser focus at long range. This, however, limits available emitters and thus targetable laser beams.

As such, GARDIAN unfolds its true power only at closer ranges of hundreds of kilometers for mainline laser defense systems; at this range GARDIAN lasers can intercept hundreds of contacts per minute.

The weaknesses of GARDIAN lasers are mostly due to heat - as the laser generators, beam guides, and turrets heat up, coherency is lost, and the lasers become less and less effective at longer ranges; furthermore overheating laser generators decrease laser power and rate of fire.

At shorter ranges, hyper-velocity kinetic mass drivers also become a viable option, commonly used for laying down "fields" of kinetic projectiles which prohibit enemy contacts from passing through the resulting fields without destructive head-on impacts. These are, due to their speed, only effective at very close ranges, but absolutely lethal and useful for "herding" enemy contacts into the firing fields of lasers. Smaller vessels use their kinetic defense weapons as secondary close-in weapons as well.

Particle beams are another secondary option for equipping a GARDIAN, mostly found on larger spacecraft. Able to project kiloton KE-equivalent beams without the need for the long barrels of kinetic mass drivers with solid projectiles, particle beams have a slower fire rate but higher effective distance. At mid-ranged distances, these weapons are extremely effective, but can be repulsed by kinetic barriers. As such, they are mostly used on the larger ships that can mount and power these few turrets to intercept torpedoes and thin out missile swarms, especially high-velocity, high-maneuverability hunter-killer missiles.

 **Particle Cannons**

Kinetic mass drivers face one ultimate obstacle - the accelerator length that permits high velocities yet still retains a solid projectile to fire out the other end. In a bid to increase the range of turret-mounted kinetic weaponry, particle cannons bypass the acceleration limitations of solid projectiles. However, beam coherency limits the effective range where particle cannons can engage, and modern kinetic barriers can defend against particle beams not only through repulsive fields coupled with absorption and reflection of kinetic momentum, but also disrupting fields with chaotic vectors. Alternatively, counter-fire from "interceptor" particle beams, offer another avenue of defense against particle cannons, which has kept them from proliferating as the main co-axial weapons of Ships of the Sword and Ships of the Plane.

Still, at medium ranges, particle beams have become a mainstay of turreted cruiser and battleship combat, and some frigates employ particle cannons as their main co-axials, eschewing kinetic firepower at close range for medium-range "sniper" capability.

 **Autonomous Kill Vehicles**

Hybrids between a starfighter and a heavy cruise missile, Autonomous Kill Vehicles are battlespace drones originally developed as autonomous missile buses equipped with more expensive but high-performance drive systems.

AKVs fell out of galactic use with the advent of modern, high-speed space combat involving tactical FTL maneuvers, limiting the weapons utility to recon and utility purposes as rapidly shifting battlespaces and increases in engagement distance forced AKVs out of effective control range.

The quarians and humans both re-developed and improved the concept of the modern AKV through the use of far more advanced control systems, turning AKVs into viable, long-range threats. Equipped with high-performance drive cores and engines, the modern AKV became a viable tool for swamping GARDIANs in multi-vector missile attacks, barraging enemies at close range, and providing battlespace support in the forms of ECM, jamming, and longscan capability.

The heaviest modern user of AKVs is humanity and its System Alliance Space Force, which employs the most advanced, AI-driven AKVs to date. The second-largest employers are the Salarians, who re-developed the Carrier Destroyer for their own, VI-driven and thus operator-dependant AKV swarms.

On a technical note, AKVs are smaller than fighters, and regarded as potentially expendable - ramming an AKV into a target is as much a viable engagement option as retrieving and re-arming it.

 **FTL Plotter Jamming**

Since the advent of the FTL drive, the fact that parties can easily disengage from a given Battlespace using FTL once sufficient clearance has been achieved has been a major problem of space combat tactics and strategy.

FTL plotter jamming was developed as an early-to-mid Council era method of binding an opponent in a desired battlespace at least for more time. The nature of the modern FTL plotter and its sensors demands that the jammer plattform conduct a directional transmission straight into the apertures of the forward (or otherwise facing) sensors of the spacecraft to be interdicted, to lock up the FTL plotter.

Secondly, FTL jamming is defeatable in a variety of ways. As with normal FTL jamming, rapid switching of used frequencies and sensors as well as improved analysis and filtering algorithms can defeat the jamming. The jamming platform itself may be destroyed or its jamming beams outmaneuvered. Military spacecraft, especially capital ones, have FTL plotter sensors in multiple locations, enabling maneuvers such as the infamous "backward disengage", accelerating into FTL on the retro thrusters.

Lastly, there remains the option of spoofing or overriding the FTL Plotter - which, while hard, is far from impossible, but puts the ship at risk of fatal collisions as it drops into its FTL bubble.

In the history of space engagements, whenever FTL Plotter jamming has been used, it failed in the overwhelming majority of cases to indeed "hold" an enemy in the battlespace - Commonly, after only seconds of maneuvering, the craft can disengage into FTL successfully, and the best cases of FTL jamming had durations of minutes at most - forcing spacecraft to engage in lethal knife-range fighting in a desperate bid to disable the jammed spacecraft before it can disengage into FTL.

* * *

 **A/N(Nick):** So yeah, space combat. Ahoy! Also, shout out to jerseydanielgibson. Thanks for the review! About the question...

 **A/N** **(Sevoris):** No, Martinez was compromised the old-fashioned way, with a honeypot and damaging "evidence"; he wasn't ghosthacked. Humans have brain activity scans before classified files exactly to prevent such from compromising their higher-up personnel.


	13. Two Ravens Pt 2

_Muninn_ began up its own contribution to the battlespace with ripple fire from its uneven-faces missile banks, dual VLS rows cold-launching Anti-Ship Missiles into space in between the still-burning fusion candles, black spears oriented with puffs of RCS before shooting away on blue plasma drives.

Then the _Muninn_ opened up with its main driver, and began long-range bracketing fire, exploiting the remaining c-fractional velocity it was bleeding to help the rounds pass into the target area quicker, continuing to fire as it decelerated.

In response to the new threats, the _Oliver_ turned, bow-forward, into the fire and went to full burn, GARDIAN tasked forward and launchers spitting 12 interceptor drones into space. Then, still presenting the smallest aspect, it began evasive action, ECM at full power as it lured the incoming fire with false positives and dazzled their sensors, particle cannons swinging aft to engage Huginn, invisible lances streaking out to slam themselves into the barriers in flashes of blue and white.

Relativistic travel speeds meant that their sensors were degraded - and with limited ability to make effective course corrections, the missile barrage from _Muninn_ missed entirely. None of the missiles made it into the main GARDIAN envelope, and the _Huginn_ was forced to abort a new gun-run on the _Oliver_ to skew-flip and burn about, evading a swarm of missiles as they streaked away and out of the battlespace before detonating in flares of blue, a drive's star extinguished in a nova.

Having evaded the first salvo of guided missiles, the _Oliver_ turned out of the path of the next barrage from the Muninn that followed close behind, letting the streaking rounds flash overhead and into the depths of space at some 0.22 cee. The _Oliver_ then evaded the next salvo, AI-controlled weaves sending the ship through the incoming fire, turning at the outer ranges of the ship's safety envelope and constantly swinging the nose around to apply new vectors with its main engines.

The _Huginn_ followed close behind in a circling arc, using predefined holes in the bracketing fire coordinated between the two Warmind congruences to minimize its own evasive actions,then throttled up its cee-eem and engines in synch, "jolting" to c-fractional speeds and blitzing across the battlespace. The _Huginn_ skew-flipped, killings its velocity and coming about to herd the _Oliver_ into a killzone between itself and the Muninn.

The _Oliver_ twisted out of the first envelope attempt using its RCS, flipping in a complex maneuver only made possible by AI-coordination of the thrusters to keep adding "upwards" velocity while flipping end-over-end; entering a c-fractional cruise of its own, angling down and underneath a barrage from _Muninn_ , the _Oliver_ spun and burned to evade the next barrage from the _Huginn_ , its own GARDIAN firing as it came about to throw 20- and 30-kilo slugs off their paths. Then, it spit another barrage of missiles, light Anti-AKV Hunter-Killers mounted on first stage delivery buses.

The AKV envelope went evasive, burning hard and fast to overcome the missiles and deplete their Delta-V reserve.

And then it "slipped", the heat systems of the AKVs overtaxed, and the last five remaining AKVs, four of Harpy Flight and one of Raider Flight, fell behind, unable to maintain their acceleration for the immediate danger of catastrophic overheating of core systems.

The _Muninn_ responded immediately.

❰ _Launching Wyvern Flight. Separation underway._ ❱

RCS spun the ship; then it switched from the main retros to smaller, bow-mounted secondaries, clearing the launch bays of the indiscient hot plasma streams above them. Twelve more AKVs launched in waves of three, and raced towards their target.

The _Oliver_ 's reaction was an aggressive, equally brilliant and desperate maneuver. With the _Muninn_ deploying its AKVs from 60,000 kilometers stand-off range, they were not angling out immediately to reform the jamming sphere, nor had they launched as one coherent group, spacing them out by effective one-thousand kilometers. It was an opportunity the _Oliver_ exploited.

Spiking its cee-eem bubble, the craft accelerated hard and fast at the edge of what the engines could provide, redlining them as the MEFGs provided their best field gradient. From the _Huginn_ 's perspective, the enemy spacecraft seemed to shoot towards the incoming AKVs, weapon blisters tracking, lashing out.

Wyvern 1, 2 and 3 were all blown apart by a mixture of main co-ax, particle beam turret and laser fire, the _Oliver_ flashing past the plasma clouds they left behind in the wake of their detonation seconds later.

Wyvern 4, 5 and 6 initiated immediate evasive action, skew-flipping around to bleed fatal velocity - an action which only increased the engagement options to the missiles SCAS _Oliver_ carried, forcing them into evasive action. 4 managed to complete a daredevil maneuver and blew its pursuing missiles to heat death with its own co-axial, Wyvern 5 zorched away at cee-fractional speeds and simply outran its pursuing munitions, 6 managed to slip its own in a similarly daredevil move to Wyvern 4, though it lost one maneuvering pylon and immediately shut down systems, overheating under the thermal load of hyper-velocity maneuvering.

Forced to hold its fire as the _Oliver_ positioned itself before Cedatis Station, the _Muninn_ was forced to hold the fire of its most lethal weapons, discharging its forward torpedo accelerators as the only armament it could viably use.

Wyvern 7, 8 and 9 flashed past the _Oliver_ , forced to jink as Particle Beams were shunted into their vectors. They overshot completely, only able to begin turnaround burns after they had completed their high-thrust evasive action.

By the time Wyvern 10, 11 and 12 approached, the Oliver was reaching over 0.15 cee in velocity, and all AKVs made the same unanimous decision.

Wyvern 10 missed, blasted onto a new vector at the last second as the full ventral GARDIAN network converged on the drone, managing to breach the fusion reactor despite heat-induced coherence loss.

Wyvern 11 was shredded by the kinetic point defenses before its debris slammed into the Oliver's barriers at an oblong angle. 120 effective kilotons of kinetic energy transferring themselves into the fields.

The barriers of SCAS Oliver broke in a massive photon field flash of decoherent field collapse; The Oliver flipped and turned, making last-microsecond maneuvers to dodge the last viable threat.

Wyvern 12 ripped one of the radiator wings off in a white impact flash and caused the _Oliver_ to spin, though it did not knock the craft off its escape vector. RCS flared hard as the craft began to stabilize, fighting the imparted force, damage alarms wailing in the CIC of the OFIF ship. Countermissile launchers flashed, and blew the torpedo barrage diving in behind the last AKVs completely out of the black.

The corvian Warminds coordinated. Their jamming screen was gone. At the closing ranges, missiles would be unviable - the _Huginn_ 's missiles were unable to pick up enough speed to intercept the still-accelerating Oliver and the bad angle of the head-on engagement by the _Muninn_ would result in direct destruction of Bandit-01 from the impact of the missiles alone. The same applied to full-powered barrage shots which had a low RPM, for which the target had too much speed and a too small interception window.

That left one last chance to disable Bandit-01 before it could disengage into FTL.

The warminds took it.

Diverting all cooling power to its GARDIAN lasers, the _Muninn_ narrowed down its head-on intercept with the _Oliver_ , whose own radiators were glowing bright-hot, close to overloading under the heat of combat systems and its main drives.

SSV _Muninn_ 's main co-ax cut loose, a massive burst of light breaking out from the nose, slow rounds with only one kiloton of power that overrode all safeties and brought the accelerator rails into ablative temperatures, each fast shot after the next chipping material of the rails, degrading their use. Four shells connected with Bandit-01, blowing craters into the armoring and leaving long, white-glowing grooves.

The _Muninn_ turned to present its broadside, lasers slashing at close-range, as the white flashes of their impact points turned into volcanoes of vaporized foam and plating; deep glowing scars etched themselves into the hulls.

Bad luck had it that the laser turreted intended to destroy the _Oliver_ 's main fusion reactor's ventral side and abort its escape was hit by a laser from the _Oliver_ 256 milliseconds before it could lock and fire, a megawatt beam intended for far longer-ranged engagements burning through the di-electric reflectors and collimators before cutting and melting the turret mechanism. Safety interlocks cut in, and _Muginn_ 's laser emitter fell silent, the _Oliver_ 's main fusion reactor untarnished.

Just as quickly as the intercept had begun, it had passed.

Free of jamming, the _Huginn_ racing after it at the outer edge of its acceleration envelope while flinging shells and missiles in a last desparate fire mission, the _Oliver_ 's navigational sensors kicked in.

Two seconds later, it accelerated to cee-fractional speeds in a blur of blue and a flash of engines, mass effect fields approaching the Capachelly point, gaining in distance. 10,000 kilometers. 50,000 kilometers. 100,000 kilometers. 0.8 cee. 0.99 cee.

Transition.

SCAS _Oliver_ was gone, its light trail slowly creeping away, a last mocking goodbye to its pursuers as the source of the light raced away at increasing FTL speeds, heading for deep space.

The _Huginn_ and the _Muninn_ both kicked in their retros, cycling down from combat mode. Hatches opened, and emergency heat radiator sails unfolded from storage mode, beginning to glow with heat from onboard systems.

In the distance, a few clusters of undetonated munitions flared as they self-destructed, pinpricks among pinpricks, visible only for an instant.

Drone craft launched from both combat starships as they deployed their Search and Clean robots, sending them out after major vectors of their co-axial and point defense fire. In a few hours, the craft would nudge the projectiles onto harmless intercepts with planetary bodies and the local star using low-yield lasers; by the time the spacecraft could expect to head back home, the robots would have redirected every single piece of kinetic ammunition. A public debris warning for the local SysCon and its traffic buoys would complete the clean-up, keeping other craft clear of the marked trajectories.

Then both turned around, slowly, and burned, heading back for the white dot of Cedatis Station, and the Mission teams. Now there was no cause to run the engines hot, no reason to be somewhere fast; they let field generators and containment coils cool down, and withdrew weapons and closed hardpoints.

Inside the CIC of the _Huginn_ , Captain Stewards turned to his XO, then made visual eye contact with his crew, as they came out of the congruence. Their thoughts were etched into their faces and body expressions, Shells restrained inside the thick acceleration webbing pressing them down on their interfaces couches.

Once again, FTL had been the trump card.

They had failed. The enemy had escaped.

* * *

The space around Cedatis Station was still in uproar when both spacecraft returned, now flashing their System Alliance transponder codes in the open and running blue-on-white livery on their hulls for everyone to see.

The open channels filled with curses and insults rather quickly, Captains Stewards and Xiolen listening to them all passively, the crews taking the backlash with detached professionalism.

One small freighter got cocky and kept going on a dangerous trajectory, before the SSV _Muninn_ simply presented its broadside and made a stern, low-power laser-assisted warning to back off. The craft complied, still spitting half-hearted insults in the open net.

Captain Xiolen leaned back in his interfacer/acceleration couch, digesting what had just gone down in barely 4 minutes of space combat action. Bandit-01, SCAS _Oliver_ , had been far too tough for a simple refitted freighter. Its kinetic barriers had been heavy, top-of-the-line models, its lasers had not been cutting-edge but still very effective, and whomever had stood at the helm and commanded it knew how to stand his ground against two other spacecraft trying to interdict him.

The entire affair smelled of ex-military personnel and overall, fishy in the extreme.

He turned around to his XO, Jane Dacosta: "Any word from the Ground teams?"

"Nothing for us, so far. They're talking with the _Huginn_ and preparing the inspections and forensics teams for transfer, but nothing in the line for us."

"Then let's just keep next to the _Huginn_ and keep an eye on the salvage and clean-up ops in the meantime." His throat suddenly felt dry.

"Aye Sir." She opened a private channel: [ ...Sir, if I may suggest you get some rest? I know the congruence and the consequences got to you, maybe you should clear your mind now.]

He smiled, suddenly tired but thankful for the care of his XO. [Thanks.]

"XO, you have the conn."

"I have the conn, aye sir."

He unbelted himself and headed aft, for his personal quarters and his terminal, where his Vidlog and a cup of good tea would already be waiting for him.

* * *

"What do you mean, Cedatis Approach blocked your parking orbit and denied permission for the teams to come a-station?"

Motoko Kusanagi was picking up her pace, now out of her Shell suit and wearing only her light undersuit one-piece. Her left trouser had been removed so a gunmetal black, bionic replacement leg could be anchored to her Shell, replacing the damaged one she had lost to a Mech only minutes ago.

At this point, she was about ready to start shooting people.

First her assault operation had nearly fallen apart.

Then she'd lost a pursuit to a lance of war robots.

THEN the escape craft had slipped through the grasp of two military spacecraft - not fitted with the latest tech, sure, but still _cutting edge_!

And now Traffic control was throwing a tantrum too. Some part of her was expecting a headache right about now.

At the moment, she was heading back to the OFIF hideout, two bioroid escorts at her side, to debrief.

"It's exactly what I'm telling you," XO Dacosta's voice said in her ear, clearly exasperated herself by the turn of events. "Some of the traffic controllers are locking up, citing our 'wild-west behavior' as a reason to deny us a parking orbit or the permission to transfer shuttles."

"You told them this is a Section 9 Op?" She reached the lower parking bay, and the mission teams of Alpha-01 and Alpha-02, gathered in circles around the Tachikomas, doing post-mission patch-ups, tending to wounds and damage and doing small-talk.

"Yes, Ma'am, I did. Didn't sway them."

" _Fine by me_. Stand-by." She turned to the room at large: "Hey! Get moving, we got more work!" The Mission team members looked up, then got on their feet and picked up weapons and helmets.

She turned around, and drew her service pistol.

 _If you want to cover them - Fine._ By. Me. _Now suffer the consequences._

10 minutes later, 2 traffic controllers leaned, ghost-locked and handcuffed, against a wall inside Cedatis Traffic control. Severa more had been subdued non-lethally and then herded into a corner, under watch by Williams and Antoine from Alpha-02. The room was open and airy, its walls completely lined with massive holographic screens, and similar massively sized screens for the traffic operators.

"You can't do this!", a young kid at his station shouted, flipping his mike up to mute it. Batou opened his visor and turned to face the young man.

"Supporting a terrorist group, impeding a System Alliance law enforcement operation, resisting arrest.", he listed. "Yes, we can."

"Law enforcement?!" another Operator complained, voice cracking with anger: "You fucking shoot up a starship out there, cause massive havoc by lighting up antimatter-catalyzed fusion candles within 10,000 kliks off the station and near traffic and call that _Law enforcement_?!" His fist landed on a railing with a bang.

Batou turned to face him, tone hostile: "Last I noticed we were arresting a dangerous terrorist cell which has several dozen counts of real death and property damage in the billions on their chest, or rather, we were trying to arrest them, before they slipped us because of those two a... men."

Raven placed a hand on his shoulder: [Batou, let it rest. We harshed the local color enough as is. Last we need is you burning the ashes.]

Two bioroids moved go pick up the two arrested traffic controllers.

"Get them moving to the docks. They're getting shipped over to the _Muninn_ together with the OFIF prisoners on the next available shuttle", Major Kusanagi ordered, then turned around, a forced cheerfulness in the voice: "Which, by the way, I would really appreciate being granted clearance right about now."

The senior Supervisor, clearly older and more experienced and himself disgusted at what had happened under this nose, agreed: "Yes, Ma'am. We'll get it done immediately."

"Thank you." Kusanagi turned to leave.

"Bitch", someone mumbled under his breath.

He punched himself in the face a second later.

Batou and Paz managed to contain their snickering long enough for the doors to close.

* * *

The OFIF cell's former hideout had turned into an almost literal hornet's nest.

Mirroring drones were everywhere, scanning every micrometer of the rooms with lasers, light field cameras, sonar, MRI, and T-ray scanners. Everything was photographed from every available angle by "Hummingbird" drones, before Molly drones turned to scanning every inch for molecular and atomic residue of any kind.

Behind them, the humanoid forensic teams moved in to bag everything once it had been thoroughly documented; corpses were tagged, their stacks and other cybernetics extracted on the spot where possible and locked away separately in armored cases, before body bags were rolled out and the shells transferred over and sealed inside.

Meanwhile, evidence was being bagged from tables; computers were located, dug out of walls and furniture, and secured for more thorough data analysis back at HQ. Personal belongings were bagged and indexed alongside working equipment, half-finished project, and finished devices. A group of weapon and explosives specialists moved about removing all of the weaponry, sealing it up separately and shipping it out as soon as possible.

Above it all, more monitoring drones held vigil, documenting every activity for archiving and legal use.

The Mission Teams stood aside from the commotion, slowly storing their own equipment and locking it inside the passenger pods of the Tachikomas. By now, the post-battle stress was etched into nearly everybody's face, brains and bodies recovering from the stress of combat augmentation.

In many ways, Paz had noticed once, getting off battle augmentations was similar to after a drug trip. Between hormones, combat drugs, and neuronal augmentations, the return to normal cognitive operations caused all sorts of grinding gears, especially for those not used to the Battle trance. Himself included, as he had sardonically remarked, massaging his scalp.

[Miss Kusanagi, you have an incoming communication from Director Aramaki. Encrypted, full-body ARvatar conference]

[I'll take it here.]

She turned around and faced an open space of the garage floor.

Inside her ARO, Aramaki materialized in full body render, as if he stood two meters in front of her. His arms were folded at this side, and he has his usual stratified body posture.

[Sir.]

[Major. What is the situation at Cedatis Station? The Opfeed intercepts I've been feed paint a mixed picture.]

[I'm afraid that's true, Sir. The assault on the OFIF hideout was largely a success - but four people managed to slip our perimeter via a prepared escape route that involved using an unstable 'field to burrow through solid rock, then slipped our pursuit on foot by using a war robot squad as cover. The spacecraft they used to escape with managed to slip the Huginn and Muninn after a prolonged space engagement with medium damage but full interstellar flight capability.]

[Hmmm.] Aramaki telegraphed his unhappiness with the situation minute, but clearly to her augmented perception. [Alright. We will deal with the larger fallout of this later. Do you have any information on what they were doing yet?]

[No sir. The first files were just transferred over and Athena is doing a mirror analysis on the recovered data to get as a preliminary assessment, but it hasn't come in yet.]

[Okay. I'll be offline, working the political gears. I suspect the real shitstorm's just about to cut loose.]

[Could be, Sir. There's indication of… extensive support of the OFIF cell by the local population and authorities. Don't know how deep this one goes.]

[... _Chikushou_. I will take care of this, and get the AIS on board. Clean the situation up, authorities will be on site to take over in a few hours. Get your team ready to ship out by then.]

[Yes Sir, I will see to it. And sorry Sir.]

[Major, bad luck is the trade of every commander and director. I will deal with this, as I have dealt with everything else. Good evening.]

[Evening Sir. I'll drop anything important into your contacts.]

[Do that, Major. Aramaki, out.]

The connection closed.

"Everything alright Major?", Togusa asked behind her. She turned around and took his armor in; scorched gray, white and black by plasma, and the armor plating thoroughly roughened up by shrapnel.

"I will manage just fine, thank you." She produced a confident, friendly smile with just a touch of authority: "Everything alright with yourself?" She prodded his armor experimentally.

"I'll live. Shock's still sitting pretty deep now though that everything's over. This was the closest call I ever had." He closed his eyes for a second. "I… had another flashback to my wife and children, during the greyout." His eyes didn't reconnect with hers.

She patted him on the back reassuringly and nodded Batou, silently signaling him that Togusa needed some more support. "But you lived. Your shell is intact, your wife and children are fine and you will see them again in this life. Everything is okay."

"Yeah, yeah… thank god it is."

She handed Togusa over to Batou and Raven, who had joined her Second-in-Command in taking care of Togusa, and keyed a voice communication with Huginn: "Athena-Actual, what is the preliminary on the data we recovered?"

The Ops AI connected after a second: "Looks like your Intel from SILVER THROAT was spot-on. I indeed recovered a large data file of suspicious content, which included lots of executable files.

"Based on preliminary analysis, the data package you recovered is a Ghosthack weapon. A new one. Custom-written language, extremely sophisticated code."

"A good knock-off?", she asked.

"Negative. My analysis has revealed few carry-overs from known old attack software. By indication, this is a completely new development."

"...Continue." _So it was even worse than Ken indicated._

"Based on finished analysis, the weapon is definitely a sophisticated Ghosthack - To be precise, the vector tool. I have identified several file formats and interfaces for loading a payload file into the weapon program. None of your recovered files fit the payload format itself.

"Far more worrying is the vector tool itself. While I have identified DNI subversion software, it is modular."

Kusanagi stopped her pacing, listening intently: "Modular? There is more than one delivery vector?"

"Yes. A system only known to me to be in System Alliance Armed Forces possession - A basilisk hack system, seems to form the other major, or indeed the major, delivery vector of the Ghosthack. I have identified visual and auditorial vectors in the basilisk attack package, based on output analysis and comparison as well as comments on the code.

"Thirdly, the software is coded for several neurological architectures. So far I have identified two separate sets of configurations and separate individual software subtools that are loaded depending on the target parameters and seem to govern fundamental vector executive processes. Whatever this new Ghosthack weapon is intended for, it can subvert more than just transhuman egos - and it does not require a DNI to do so."

Silence.

"Major Kusanagi?"

" _Shit_!"

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):**...I guess that's bad.

Upcoming after all the action and revelations is a larger personal interlude chapter as the team heads home and relaxes from their last OP, digesting what has just happened. At the same time, other things are set into motion...


	14. Consequences Pt 1

[SAIN/TITAN-CONSENSUS/HESTIA-SUB/THRD.5411.0052. ]

"...the failure to keep ourselves safe clearly shows that either more has to be done or existing agencies have to replaced!"

"Please, with what? People will always slip through the grid even with modern security systems…"

"...then perhaps we should end the continuous intrusion of privacy and the predictive modeling of every citizen…"

"...That's just asking to make it worse. You're aware that without our modern ASIs crimes would escalate massively…"

"Hardly. The current escalation was brought on by the hardline altitude of the government!..."

"...Yeah right, the 'big bad Systems Alliance'. We all know that the system was prototyped and driven forward by the Big Five, and let's not pretend otherwise…"

"...And yet, nothing was achieved! Nothing!"

"That's an understatement and a lie. For every attack you hear about there are many, many prevented ones you don't hear about."

"Or so you claim."

"...You can have the list of citations right here…"

"Oh please, official memetic bullcrap."

"Numbers don't lie."

"No. The ones delivering them do."

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

/HESTIA-SUB: ANALYSIS TRAWL UNDERWAY  
/_OPPINION DEVELOPMENT LOGGED  
/_ PUBLIC CONSENSUS DRIFT - [ MEDIUM ]  
/_ NO EXTREME VIOLATIONS OF CONTINUITY DETECTED == NO INTERVENTION REQUIRED  
/_ CONTINUING TO MONITOR

[ ]

* * *

"Stand-by for Influx… 3… 2.. 1."

Darkness crept away from them into the distance as SSV _Muninn_ re-entered the relativistic universe and its starbow, far away stars, starships and stations clustered together in the distance as the bright ending of a dark tunnel, the light spreading across their bow as the craft bleed velocity and decelerated to under 0.8 cee .

"SSV _Muninn_ , this is Arcturus Approach, authenticated. We have you arriving at IPTP-L 055, 1732 Hours 03-18. Squawk ID and Intent and proceed on current 'Line at 0.1 cee at this time, stand-by for your approach plan."

"Copy, Arcturus Approach. Decelerating to 0.1 cee and holding for your plan on current 'Line."

The distant blue circle grew to expand across the entire viewfront, and for a short single moment they were surrounded on all sides by a beautiful, exotic sky of blues and reds dotting the starscape. For a moment, the human and AGI crew alike shifted their attention to the main holographics, watching the incredible physical spectacle unfold before their eyes.

Then the glow faded, and smaller details sketched themselves out of the blue-shift.

Ishikawa noticed the small change in background tone, the hum of MEFGs at power receding, and opened his eyes. "Well, we're back."

Their return to the bulk of Arcturus Station was a silent, brooding one. The Mission Team members and some of the support personnel had taken refuge in the Muninn's upper crew lounge and were watching the approach to Arcturus Station on the holographic walls and ceiling.

At this distance, Arcturus Station was only a fuzzy oblong dot in the darkness of space, mostly visible due to the tiny lights and bright drive lances of starships surrounding it, and arriving and departing into interplanetary space through sets of designated FTL interface points.

"SSV _Muninn_ , approach plan on your glass."

"Check. Mirrored and… authenticated. _Muninn_ is beginning approach to MDS 01, Arm 08."

Togusa breathed a slow sigh of relief as the details of Arcturus Station sketched themselves out on the holographic display. Its two O'Neil cylinders were most visible at long range, stray light rays from the mirror petals shining brighter than the outer surface insulation.  
Then the main docking spokes and Arcturus Core became visible. Four massive tori, two on each side of the station, sprouted docking arms into space, most of them reserved for military flights; Arcturus Core's three Stanford Torus habitats rotated around the central Bernal Sphere that housed SAAF High Command.

It had been a long flight home; on their way core-ward, the two starships had taken a two-hour stop at a remote, Kuiper-stationed OSI spaceyard that had replaced armor plating and other destroyed hull systems. The remaining time had been occupied with servicing and stowing their gear and armor, going through medical check- and fix-ups (including replacement of damaged cybernetic components and in Togusa's case, shrapnel removal from his torso and legs), and working through the AAR, meticulously reviewing and analysing the camera recordings and thought-logs, analysing movement, coordination and strategy - as well as where they had succeeded or blundered. Then they went over the preliminary evidence and recorded their personal reports for the logs, finally being freed for the day some two hours ago.

Deccelerating, _Muninn_ passed through the perimeter marked by the Defense Stations that surrounded Arcturus Station and its attending habitats and support stations, the massive sticks of Defense platforms and the arrowheads of the local Guard Fleet, then ordered itself into the military trajectories and came in for docking.

"SSV _Muninn_ , Docking Control is taking your over. Deccelerate to 250 ms-max and hold on the ball, 200 meters dock stand-off on the nose."

"Copy. Bleeding to 250 ms-max and holding 200 of the bow," Helm Officer Nagati handled the entire maneuver with cool professionalism, directing the maneuvering AI with simply snapping together individual modules into clusters of directives.

The needle hull of _Muninn_ smoothly slipped into position, shifting itself before the open dock with its reaction control system, bursts of steam serving as reaction mass in lieu of the deep-space plasma thrusters. Lasers played across the hull as craft and station scanned for the purposefully mounted reflectors on the hull and the dock superstructure.

Nagati handed off completely to the AIs, and kept watch as they slowly but steadily brought the millions of tons of spacecraft home in its berth, docking arms reaching out, smoothly mating with the attachment points, then arresting the last few m/s in velocity. Hatches popped open all over Muninn as service feeds approached on more arms from the walls of the aerogel-shielded dock, and power, cooling and data feeds connected.

"Right, begin the spindown", Captain Xiolen ordered. "Full shipside shutdown so the spaceframe repairs can begin. Personnel airlocks?"

"Already in the cue."

Five minutes later, the Mission Teams were cleared for disembarkation, and they made their way to the personnel airlocks, mixing in with crew already there, some with their own duffle bags slung over shoulders, most of them wearing Spacy-issue survival suits, colorations and stripes donating rank and station aboard their spacecraft. They checked out in groups of 15 with an android standing guard at the inner door, then entered the airlock proper.

" _Please stand-by. Decontamination underway. Keep US-unshielded eyes closed._ "

"So, what are you going to do?", Togusa asked Ishikawa and Batou over the hum of the decontamination and the hissing of the sterilizing Nanobot sprayers.

"AAR we already did and nothing else is on our schedules for today, so… I think I'm just going to take an evening walk with Gabriel, try to relax. We'll all need to blow off steam before we're due to face the music tomorrow," Batou said, staring into the deep blue light that bathed the airlock.

"Paz and Borma already asked me to get out for a drink at our usual establishment," Ishikawa said. "And I think you," he blindly thumped at Togusa, "are due for some personal time with your family."

Togusa nodded silently, mouth pressed together, but a smile edging onto his lips.

"I will", he said.

" _Decontamination finished. Pressurization complete. Have a nice evening._ "

The pressure doors in front of them hissed open, and released them into the personal gangway.

 **= Chapter 4 - "Consequences" =**  
 **-| May 18th, 2232 |-**

"To my home, please." Togusa dropped in the leather seat of his aircar, and deposited his duffle bag on the co-drivers seat.

" _Yes Mr. Togusa_!", the AI chimed happily. " _One moment please… and we are underway._ "

With a faint hum of the core, field generators and the cars electrojets, his aircar departed from the parking lot and smoothly threaded itself into the traffic, traveling down a tight tube with other traffic packed together as tightly as securely possible. The aircar took a left turn and rotated right 90°, seeming to dive down a heavier traffic avenue.

Arcturus Station had an internal network of connecting tubes, tight AI-managed traffic avenues that allowed airborne traffic to frequent between the two O'Neil Habitats, the three Stanford Tori, and accesses to Arcturus Core as well as dozens of other points in the stations remaining superstructure.

His aircar passed regular series of platforms and Kiggs fields, traveling a solid kilometer of spacecraft dock superstructure before it approached the final set of field, warm evening light falling into the tunnel.

The aircar emerged into a cylindrical world bathed in warm light, split into sixes. Three blades were filled with the warm glow of captured sunlight, and offered a clear view of the traffic and starfield; in between them, green and blue terraformed land soaked up the solar radiation from the window blade opposite of itself, "natural" and "artificial" structures glimmering the light.

The car began spinning and descending almost immediately, starting to match the rotational gravity of the cylinder, and descended onto Blade 2's hillside. Underneath him, pleasing wilderness drew past, intermixed with aircar parking slots, low-slung structures, wooden walkways and large meadows, forests, and lots of rivers. Small animals were visible, blitzing through the wilderness for moments at a time. The diversity of plants was breathtaking.

Ahead, the low-slung towers and 'plexes of New Vancouver drew closer. The "city" had been designed by the SA to house many of its on-station employees and personnel, and as such was almost entirely dedicated to governmental housing and support. Togusa had lived in a medium-sized apartment here during his time with Starpol, then moved up a bit to a newer, high-security Megaplex that stood of slightly from the main city complex, build into a "hillside". On aerial approach, the hidden-away perimeter buildings were quite visible, and Togusa was aware that in this very second, some of the drones populating the sky were subjecting his aircar to a thorough check, weapons close behind readying to transform the car into a fireball if the security systems ID'ed him as a threat.

For himself, nothing happened; the machinery of security and authentication ran its silent digital course in the background, and they descended smoothly onto the top air garage level of one of the apartment towers.

" _We have arrived at your home! Have a nice evening, Mr. Togusa._ " The driver's door opened on its own and his belt disengaged, the smart fabric withdrawing smoothly and without rubbing over the clothing.

"Thanks", he said as he worked to get the duffle bag out of the seat and over his shoulder.

An open elevator was already waiting for him, together with a multi-limbed white polymer service android. "Can I take your luggage, sir?", he asked in an deep, british voice.

Togusa dropped the duffle bag into the androids hand with a thankful nod and stepped inside the elevator. It departed for Level 6 without further ado, top-to-bottom glass overlooking an open central lobby and vertical garden.

"Ah, welcome home Mr. Togusa! Your dinner is almost ready", Jaina, his family's personal android, greeted him at the door of his apartment, casually taking the duffle bag from the service android, which departed with a slight bow in Togusa's direction, and vanished around the corner.

"Thanks Jaina. Anything happen while I was away?"

"Well, you might be overjoyed to know that the FC Bayern Munich won the Sol European League yesterday…"

Togusa let loose a grin. "Didn't hear that one actually, was off-feed during the day. How did it end?"

"3:1."

His grin broadened. "So the new Augs they pushed in still didn't cut it."

"Well, as you said, it's not only about the physical."

"True."

The apartment was tidy and in orderly disorder, as he and his wife liked to call it - Cleaned spot-free, but with the furnishing, decoration and devices arranged in ways that did not appear unnaturally controlled to human perception.

Togusa gazed on the big paintings that dominated the walls of the apartments main floor. Two stood side-by-side, easily visible from the corridor that connected the main room and the doorway: One painting was the big, ten-blade interior of O'Neil 4 of _Nouveau Paris_ , captured in oils; the other was a delicate oil painting of Mount _New Fuji_ against a clear, dark blue sky and a blue-ish sun, from the japanese Core colony of _New Honshu_ , and a place Togusa had visited during his Exchange Year in the _Collège Européenne_. It was also where he had met his then-future wife.

They still remembered that year fondly.

With a smile and good memories in his mind, Togusa settled down for dinner, and pinged his wive. He wanted to at least have an ARvatar meeting before night.

* * *

"This is a disaster, Aramaki! An absolute and utter _disaster_!"

The conference room had half real, half ARvatar attendance; many had logged in from all over human space. Sol, Arcturus, Xin Beijing, New Kopenhagen. Others had only made minute-long travels from their offices in Arcturus Core.

"Hardly, Senator Phillips", Chief DeLaron from Section 8 cut in, masked disdain on her face. "This is what we deal in, every few years again. You think our business is without setbacks? It isn't. And we've still come out on top every time."

The long table offered space for 25 people, and was filled to the brim. The System Alliance's current Prime Minister, Jennifer Kovacs, sat at the top of the chair, Minister of Defense Xiang Hanying next to her, Minister of the Interior Aliina Juvonen on the other, all three present via remote Shells from Unity.

Aramaki would have been almost invisible at the table, as one of the shortest members of the group, if it weren't for the sheer authority the man was radiating even in this setting of some of humanity's most important members.

"What I would find far more interesting", Aramaki spoke, "is how OSI managed to let that Q-Ship slip. We knew they were having an influx of gear from the Traverse, but that was a human freighter chassis - And a spaceframe good enough to beat two of our own to the punch. Both of which, I might add, OSI developed and uses with solid track records."

He pointedly looked at Itaki Oliver, Director of OSI Section 5.

"How is that relevant?", Senator Phillips asked. "Your agency slipped the ball, Aramaki, pure and simple."

"My agency", Aramaki said, voice lowering, "developed the intel source that got us warned about NOVUM SPIRITUS. Without it, this threat would have completely slipped our grasp. My agency also created the field team that ensured that the threat of the cell at large was neutralized with heavy amounts of solid intelligence."

"And still a dangerous weapon - and four men - slipped your arrest."

Oliver cleared his throat. "As for the question of the unknown Q-ship, we checked our records. SCAS _Oliver_ was, last we were aware, an independent freighter in the traverse. Issued ID codes and emission profile matched both the track records on VOID EYE and the new profiles _Huginn_ and _Muninn_ recorded during the engagement. There's a good probability that the real SCAS _Oliver_ might have been switched with the spaceframe encountered at Cedatis Station, and that the craft in question circulated in the Verge before; it's certainly something we've seen before. We are now working on confirming this and reconstructing where the SCAS _Oliver_ came from and more importantly, where it went."

"Adding onto this, the forensics department is working on picking apart the Intel we recovered, in cooperation with AIS Cyber Intelligence. It's a slow process, but we are breaking the drive safeties and decoding the data stored on there. In two days at most, we will have a comprehensive and completely analysed picture of the datascape we recovered from the operation."

"Also, Senator Phillips, perhaps this might offer you some relief," one of the Chief Analysts from the aforementioned AIS CI section cut in. "We are recovering a lot of secondary intelligence from this. The flashing on many of the data cores was incomplete, or of insufficient granulate. Some of our new scanning forensics are still able to reconstruct data from the flashed mediums. We're talking com protocols, cyberterrorism software, communications, inventories, and internal scuttlebug - Which is in itself a treasure trove of information."

"Furthermore, we have over 60 Egos to interrogate and, if necessary, pick apart", another Analyst continued. "This could very well be the kickstart we need to unravel significant parts of the OFIF network and its associates, and perhaps, identify core leadership."

Senator Phillips leaned back in his chair. "Alright, so you all say it was good. So what now? What do we do about that escaped Q-ship of yours?", he waved in Aramaki's and Oliver's direction.

"We recover intelligence and we track it down. It took combat damage, which will make locating it much easier. Alternatively, we will recover where it was headed", Oliver explained.

"And with that, we come to the second point of this meeting." Aramaki turned to Prime Minister Kovacs. "Prime Minister, I will need the jurisdiction we talked about, somehow, and post-haste."

"You can't be serious?!".

 _And there comes Senator Ivanov McAllen_ , Aramaki thought, _bringing his Terra Firma politics into the game._

"Cooperating with the Citadel on this? Aramaki, you know this will end badly."

"Yes. For us, when another scandal pops. I had my team hours behind on the trail of the AIs used in the Von-Kasto-Incident, but had to abort the chase once the systems got into Citadel space. Trillions in galactic credits stolen, because my team did not have the jurisdiction to pursue.

"But, let's go a bit further back, shall we? The Batarian Embassy Incident. 25 augmented assailants, one shot-up batarian embassy, 87 C-Sec permanently dead, two Specter agents and their teams injured. Once again, I could not send in a team to deal with the situation because I did not have the jurisdiction. The public outcry of that act nearly killed our support against the batarians.

"Rachel Gilmore, 2123. O'Kamail Incident, 2122. The Acharon Cases, 2121. Illium Sprees, 2117," Aramaki started to list down, voice almost silent but cutting the air like a nanofibre elevator wire. "Jack Grant, 2117. Quintino Lenzo, 2116. I could go on."

His dark eyes bored straight into those of Senator McAllen. "All incidents with massive property damages and real deaths, all because Section 9. _Could not_. Do. a thing. And we all know how much political shitstorms and bad optics each of those incidents has generated for us."

"Who cares what the Citadel-", McAllen started.

"-the 6 turian task forces that run patrols in our trailward spaces. The economic support we receive. The STG cooperation programs regarding the Batarian Hegemony. And the 70 billion soldiers garrisons sitting at our spinward border, for starters", Aramaki cut him off. "You want me to name you more cooperation programs transhumanity has profited from immensely?" He raised an eyebrow.

McAllen said nothing. _Good, that shut him up._

He leaned back in his chair. "'The protection and upholding of the fundamental rights and the safety of a sophont are the law enforcements uttermost task.' Alliance Supreme Court, Ishira-vs-Shammas, Yildizeli, etc, 2200. The System Alliance is part of the galactic community, and my and my fellow security agencies task is to keep all those sophonts save. A task that has been _greatly_ hindered in the past, and many sophonts have suffered for.

"And now, this can stand no more. So I do not care what you think, Senator McAllen, or your colleagues in Terra Firma. I don't care about your strongman altitude. _That political crap stays out of my work of keeping sophonts safe._ "

Silence reigned at the table. Aramaki stared into McAllen's eyes, and the man stared back… for a second.

"Excuse me." Senator McAllen stood up, and disappeared through one set of doors in the center of the room.

When the meeting broke up thirty minutes later, Oliver bowed down to Aramaki: "That was ballsy. I enjoyed every second of it. I assume we will talk later…?"

Aramaki noded. "If you would excuse me, but I have to finish talking about some matters with the Prime Minister."

* * *

"Aramaki, you have my support in this, and I know you and Senator McAllen have a… history, but that wasn't necessary."

"Yes, Prime Minister, it was. McAllen has managed to hold back our efforts for years. An incident which has cost us good political capital and bad public optics that could have been avoided if not for his interference, and now it may very well lead into the _next_ debacle."

 _Besides, that the man is an idiot who has never seen military service, much less actual bloody combat action against the turians._

The face of Defense Minister Xiang told that he had the same thought as Aramaki.

Prime Minister Kovacs read the opinion in the room as easy as the next person.

"Well, Aramaki. You will be glad to hear that something is being done. A Council representative will arrive on the station within the next day and speak with you, personally, about your interests. Anita was quite surprised how fast the gears moved on this one." Meaningful looks were shared in the background.

"And that is all I am asking for." Aramaki bowed formally. "Thank you Prime Minister. Have a good night."

* * *

 **LOCATIONS** **/** **HUMAN SPACE**  
 **Arcturus Station**

Arcturus Station refers to both a human space habitat installation and a larger set of space installations surrounding that installation - What unites them all is the same sphere of influence, a maintained orbit around the Arcturus-Themis L5 Lagrange point, trailing behind the gas giant Themis.

Arcturus Station began construction in 2104 during the human First Expansion, during that time as a general-purpose habitat for housing System Alliance operations in Arcturus in a centralized location. Materials for the construction was sourced from local asteroids captured in and around the lagrange point, as well as the Themis moon system.

Construction of Phase 1 was finished in 2106, with the main habitat wheel, a Stanford Torus, finished one year earlier.

In 2118, Arcturus Station was expanded as Part of Phase 2 - Two more Stanford Tori were added to the station to increase gravitational habitat space, finished in late 2119.

In 2152, Arcturus Station received another Phase 3 upgrade; the former core of the station was rebuild around a new Bernal sphere core.

The modern shape of the central Arcturus Station was constructed in the late 2180s - In an effort to increase effective habitation space, Arcturus Station was expanded with two O'Neil cylinders that topped both ends of the station, each of them a six-blade cylinder with three terraformed blades and three massive windows. A series of mirrors was furthermore constructed in deep space to reflect light into the habitat cylinders. The cylinders interior, unlike the more heavily "green-urban" design of the core habitats, were terraformed with significant designed wilderness and few open settlements - Further living space for the majority of the population is instead provided underneath the blade surface area inside the blade foundations, and as far as the outer hull of the O'Neil habitats.

Capital spacecraft docks are provided by two sets of two tori each, which provide six docking arms in three pairs for spacecraft to dock. For more access, the second docking torus is rotated 30° compared for the first torus of the pair, reducing the chance of spacecraft conflicts during docking approaches.

The modern Arcturus station is surrounded by a set of secondary space installations in close positions around Arcturus station that are officially part of Arcturus Station as part of the Arcturus Station Space Installation. The outer shell of the Installation is a perimeter of spaceborne Starfish-class Defense Platforms mounting sets of 1.5-kilometer linear accelerators and other weapons for the defense of the "A-Triple-S", as it is commonly abbreviated.

Closer to Arcturus Stations proper lies a series of external remass and fuel depots, spaceborne cargo docks, sets of power satellites for microwave-beamed power supply, and additional sets of docking stations which were constructed as part of the Fleet Harbor Expansion in the 2140s and 2170s.

Throughout its history, Arcturus Station was primarily used by the System Alliance Spacy, housing both its military command and being the home port of several fleets, especially heavy capital craft such as supercarriers and dreadnoughts. However, the station has come to house a selection of other agencies in part or in full; this includes several law enforcement and security agencies, as well as sections of the System Alliance government.  
However, despite common myths, Arcturus Station is not the core of the SA government - Which is housed in the habitat Unity, purposefully constructed in the 2190s to house a growing System Alliance government. Unity orbits closer to Themis, at the Arcturus-Themis L1, and houses the System Alliance parliament and other governmental institutions. The ministry of Defense has its official headquarters on Arcturus; the Ministry of the Interior maintains a significant presence on Arcturus.

Despite its heavy use by the military, Arcturus Station is also a civilian station, with a significant local population and a medium-sized tourist industry.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** For those wondering why the turians have 70 billion soldiers on the human border - The Cold Years are one reason. The simple fact that the turians have a population of thousands of billions of people is another. Transhumanity is, even with a vastly expanded population base compared to ME Canon, a small drop in the bucket population-wise.

The transhuman impact on the galactic scene is largely generated through culture and technology (especialy in the medical areas) and the industry of those technological areas, not through sheer military might or population.


	15. Consequences Pt 2

"Woof! Woof! Woof!"

Batou's right arm stretched back, then began the throw. At just the right moment, he released the cord.

"Go get it Gabriel!"

The throwing toy flew over the meadow and down the hill towards the "horizon" of Blade three, one happy Basset hound dashing after it through the perfectly-maintained grass, paws flying across the ground.

Batou tracked both objects with implant-boosted precision, his augmented mind sorting out trajectories and intercepts. Inside his eyes, microlens arrays shifted, keeping pinpoint focus on Gabriel's receding figure.

Gabriel's first pounce after the falling toy missed its mark, the sphere with its attached cord bouncing back into the air; Gabriel reoriented himself like a spring and finally caught the toy as it descended to bounce a second time off the ground. Then he turned around, and sprinted back towards Batou.

"Yeah, c'mon!, C'mon Gabriel, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" Batou broke into a run of his own, smiling ear to ear, artificial legs working.

Gabriel sprinted across the gravel path behind him, and over the low wooden steps straight back onto the meadow onto the other side.

"C'mon, Gabriel!"

The Basset curved back around, and Batou relented, letting the dog catch up. Panting, gabriel dropped the toy. "Woof! Woof!" He looked into Batou's eyes, and the Ex-ranger dropped to his knees to scratch his head. Contendely, Gabriel twisted his head and tried to take Batou's hand into his mouth.

Batou took the playful bite and started wrangling. The complex composite material of fibrous woven layers, nano-sensors, -processors and -wiring, heating fibres and squishy bio-mimetic cells that emulated skin could deal with worse punishment than dog teeth, designed to resist slugs, shrapnel and knives. It felt piercingly uncomfortable, but Batou had long learned to deal with that part of his mind's insistence that his body was supposedly squishier than this.

After a second he grabbed the cord of the toy with his left hand and lifted his right up, Gabriel hanging on him until he was only standing on his hind legs, growling delightedly until he had no choice but to let go.

He dropped back down and started whimpered, eyes following the toy. "You wanna? Yes, you wanna?", Batou teased him.

"Woof! Woof! Woof!"

"Then go get 'em!" Batou threw anew, this time with enough force that his artificial arm worked audibly.

The toy went ballistic with an almost whiplash-like sound, shooting through the air, in a 40° angle to the ascending pathway, and onto another meadow. Gabriel went after it exited, "Woof! Woof!", breaking through the underbrush of a tiny forest offshoot, crashing out of the wood on the other side, still tracking the ball as it descended.

Batou keyed his ARO and threw a control window on his Dashboard, a virtual hand reaching for controls.

In the air, the toy suddenly weaved and dodged, forcing Gabriel to change direction to pursue it, the sphere wavering in the evening light as aerodynamic surface elements extruded and actuated like miniature feathers, breaking the light on their thin but strong surfaces.

Batou threw the toy into a hard right turn with a mnemonic turn of the wrist that informed the virtual hand in his ARO, and Gabriel followed the toy, racing down the meadow, catching up as air resistance slowed the ball.

But, inevitably, gravity overcame what lift the device could generate, and it plowed towards the ground, confusing Gabriel with short flares of the control surfaces to slow its fall, dancing around in the air. "Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!" Gabriel tried to jump, but missed once, twice.

Then the ball secured its control surfaces and collapsed back into a slightly flexible sphere. Gabriel managed to catch it out of the air in a low jump, temporarily dancing with excitement, then turned around and headed back for Batou.

"Arf-arf! Arf-arf!" A Golden Retriever plowed into the meadow straight through an area of dense, high grass, and tackled Gabriel playfully.

"Mr. Batou!", a young child's voice shouted happily, and he turned around just in time for another bundle of happiness to run before his feet. "Evening Mr. Batou!", Madeline Chambers cheerfully greeted him.

A natural grin broke on his face. "Hey Madeline."

"Evening, Mr. Batou", Johnathan Chambers greeted him, a friendly smile on his face, and extending one hand for a shake and a hug.

"Evening Mr. Chambers." His head turned slightly so he could see Gabriel and Duke, the throwing toy discarded and forgotten, hounding each other across the grass at high speeds, their owners forgotten in the bliss of the play.

"How nice to meet you here once again", Chambers remarked. "We see your android Daniel so often these days, and while he's a wonderful person to walk the dog, Madeline here," a hand ruffed the little girl's hair, "just finds you so much more wonderful."

"Is that so?" He got on his knees and smiled at her. She smiled back and reached out with one hand, poking his right sleepless eye playfully.

"Madeline!" her father said sternly.

"What?", she asked, feigning innocence with big eyes.

"No poking Mr. Batou's eyes!"

"It's-" Batou caught Gabriel as his Basset tried to jump him, and began to fondle him behind the ears, "It's okay. Those things were built tough." He knocked a knuckle against the left Leupold eye cybernetic, details fracturing in his vision as the micro-cameras that lined the rim of the main optic to provide peripheral vision saw spots double and -triple.

"Yeah, but it must be…?", Mr. Chambers began, before Duke jumped up his trousers. The north american man stopped for a second to produce a chaser drone from a belt pouch, inflate the device with its three smart-fabric encapsulated electrojets and a tiny central cee-eem generator, and fling it into the air. The drone activated with a low buzz and shot away a second later, Duke chasing after it, Gabriel close second behind him. After a second of consideration, Madeline ran after them, laughing: "Duke! Duke, come here! Come here, Duke!" After a second of consideration, Duke summarily ignored her and began chasing the drone again.

"...It must be rather distracting to constantly get poked in your eyes, doesn't it?", Mr. Chambers finished his question.

Batou gazed onto the terraformed landscape of Blade three, phantom gaze flickering from the forest to the grassy hills, all descending towards the water that crossed the blade in a rough diagonal form, creating two major landmasses at either side. Smaller islands peaked out of the glittering water, all of them carefully constructed around building complexes; a few entirely artificial "swimming" complexes completed the waterborne infrastructure of the blade.

The majority of open city on Blade three was set in the center, a series of bridges and water installations connecting the skyscrapers and houses on either side of the water; the rest was squashed against the end caps of the O'Neil habitat. More country-like houses with gardens were sprinkled in between; a small one of them not far from here was batou's homestead on Arcturus.

"Not in the least, especially not with kids."

The confusing gaze. One second later, as the ARO spat out the ID of the optical implants, the faces flicker to indifference, hidden curiosity. The rumors behind his back, sometimes the open hostility. Leupolds IVS are only worn by Combat Vets. The dedicated kind with the service records to keep some of their implants. Or maybe they aren't Vets. Maybe they are still on active duty.

Chambers gaze switched from the landscape to Batou and back, a slightly forced smile creeping onto this face. "Well, if you don't mind… but then, she must learn her manners."

"Oh, there I agree. But it's not like she's committing a sin of something." Wonder if she already figured out why I really have the Sleepless Eyes. She's a clever little girl.

The expression that flickered across her father's face for a second said worlds about his answer and silent question. He suppressed a bright smile. Madeline, you will do some great things once you've grown up. Batou whistled a complex tune: "Gabriel!", he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Gabriel! Come here boy!"

"Woof!"

"Gabriel! Come!"

"Woof-woof!" Gabriel and Duke both appeared over the hill temporarily before vanishing back out of sight, still chasing the drone.

"Seems like he doesn't want to hear…" Batou stepped off the pathway and onto the grass, locating the throwing toy with his ARO among the green stalks. Water pearled off the rope, and he gripped it in hand.

"Would you like me to recall the…", Chambers began asking.

"Nah. He'll come." Batou threw the toy almost vertically and whistled again.

The toy shimmered in colors and produced its own series of tunes before falling, again jinking left and right using its control surfaces.

"Woof-woof-woof! Woof!" Gabriel broke over the hill and circled underneath the falling toy, jumping again and again. "Woof!" Finally he caught the toy and pulled it down by its cord, biting around on it for a second before coming back to Batou and Mr. Chambers.

"Madeline! Come back and say Mr. Batou goodby!"

"Yes, papa!" She returned, laughing as Duke closed up with her. "Goodbye, Mr. Batou!" She waved, smiling brightly. "See you tomorrow!" And with that she followed Duke, chasing him up the hill on the other side.

"...Will you be here tomorrow?"

"If I am lucky, yes. Greetings to the family."

"Thank you. Have a nice evening with Gabriel." Jonathan Chambers gave the Basset Hound a last scratch behind one ear before patting him on the back.

"Thanks, and you too." Batous boots crunched on the gravel as he turned around and headed home, a smile still playing around his lips.

* * *

"So, I am telling you, you have to try this new SimStim experience! I don't know what they did with the coding, but the way they switch your sensory inputs around and manage the synergistic experience is just… this doesn't get through an XP or a Memon!" Miriam Xu was gushing from her place on the couch.

"How many senses do they support?" Ariena Dior asked, propping herself up on from elbow.

"6+ EXD so far. They say they got more in the pipeline, they want to wire in EM and DE next among other things. Got a Kickstarter for that, might want to take a look." Xu threw a virtual link cube through the air, plucking the light-spun item out of thin air. Dior captured it with an open hand, and absorbed it into the skin, colorful traces running up her arm and neck and into her head.

"Thanks. "

The entire group had assembled inside their favorite private Vir environment, a spacious three-story Megaplex apartment in Tridelta City. It was night outside, giving the three moons, one Luna-sized and two large asteroids, plenty opportunity to shine their light down onto the megacity and its nightlife, the contrails of aerial traffic sneaking among the winding shapes of illuminated, trigraphic-vailed skyscrapers and arcology towers.

Kusanagi had taken to sitting cross-legged in thin air near a group of couches, big pillows and chairs, an olive wood plate with snacks parked next to hear, and just absorbing the chatter of her friends as she tasted the wraps of classical and exotic foodstuffs with complex virtual tastes and secondary stimulatory effects.

At the moment, synesthetic experiences were the rage of neurostimulative programming, complex tastes exploding not only on the tongue in their manifold varied ways, but unleashing colorful images and almost spiritual sounds in tune. The indian snacks on her tongue exploded in the complex tunes of indian-asian neo-synth and tingles in red, orange, violet, blue and green running up and down her skin.

"How's it going with your boyfriend anyway, dear?" Katherina von Stachen, semi-official leader of the group, dropped on the couch next to Kusanagi, white hair flowing onto the exotic Kumanambir leather with its blue-violet stripes and orange-red spots.

Response options:

-Stall (Suggest insecurity in the area)  
-Evade -Admission -Confrontation (Too aggressive for private setting, will alienate)  
-Redirect quickly

 **[ Computing social engagement framework… ]**  
 _[Admission is the best option.]_

"Not so well, unfortunately." She made eye contact, held it. "He is a very physical person, and can't deal with the fact that I'm either at work, only present in Vir, or drop of the network for hours or days. So we broke up."

Von Stachen gave her the compassionate look she always had in such circumstances.

 **[ Emotional components: compassion, pity, exasperation, cluelessness. ]**

The entoptic readouts flickered in real-time. The modern connectivity threshold and rendering of a standard-issue Vir made biometric analysis just as effective as in real life, if not moreso. People were surprisingly unguarded with their emotions inside the Vir.

"It happens. But then, there are millions of people out there. I'm sure you will find someone at some point." If you were investing more of your time. Von Stachen patted her on the back reassuredly. "Everyone finds someone." Except those that don't want to be found. Or find someone.

Kusanagi put up a friendly, reassuring smile, and made renewed eye contact after dropping her eyes for a second. Never keep eye contact for too long in such settings. Freaks people out.

This time around she had nailed it; the entoptics didn't flurry, and Von Stachen gave a true, re-assured smile of her own, though some reservation and doubt flickered at the lower edge of the entoptics.

"You know, if it doesn't work with a transhuman, maybe you should try aliens," Xu suggested. "Asari are pretty awesome as partners. They certainly have the long view and can wait a few days."

"So you're still engaged with T'kaix? How has it developed?"

Xu's gaze shifted into the distance and became dreamy. "Awesome. She's a good partner, and a good lover."

"So, nothing like…"

"Links? If there's a program that creates the same experience, I haven't found it. If you spice it up with stims, neuromods or other links it can get even more… exciting." The dreamy smile and body language communicated enough.

"Besides, having a biotic partner only elevates the physical. Good luck finding that with your average transhuman." Xu seemed almost haughty for a moment.

"You need an organic Shell though…"

"Oh, those are easier to come by these days. There's actually several groups now who rent Shells specifically for that, including implants and nanocosmetic work. You rent a day ahead, you get full customization all the way down to the nerves for your personal experience. Got mine from Blue Biogenics, they're really good, also sell Shells for you, and you should take a look at their augmentation series packages. Their head Neurodesigner, Xian Liuxian, she's really good. You should check out her blog. Insightful stuff."

Everyone just nodded at that. Xu had been pretty adamant about her relationship with an Asari who had moved to the Xin Tianjin habitat; the two had met each other in a club during a party, though the first engagement apparently had fallen slightly flat on a lack of… meta-physical compatibility.

Kusanagi's own position on the matter was academic curiosity - as with many things, she noted. Ever since the incident, her capability to truly care for things, especially interpersonal, had been… declining. Neuroskills and -augs only helped so far; something just seemed to be… missing.

People like this where her attempt to regain what some part of her Ghost insisted had been lost or at least severely deteriorated.

But, had it ever been lost? She was unsure. There was a divide to her past that made her insecure. She just did not know if she had ever been this way. Some memories insisted on it, but memories were flexible things. Even in the modern era, every person interpreted memories and experiences slightly differently, no matter how good modern data systems were at capturing and translating concepts, not just raw neuronal data. The transhuman mind remained subjective, a paradox even as the Ego was enhanced and sublated by more rational, more ordered structures. It bend reality as it desired, with or without external aid in its wet workings.

Still brooding, she silently withdrew her primary awareness away from the Vir and back into the real world, where her Shell was approaching the apartment door. Her ECM systems pinged as the security scan ran over her shell; then she pressed a hand against the security panel next to the door and began the authentication process.

The system accepted the handprint and a set of implanted ID chips without comment; then it began authenticating her neural activity, the security AI scrutinizing her Ego with phantom-cold fingers, methodically authenticating the Ghost keys and neural integrities while checking the DNIs for virus subversion.

 **[ ID ACCEPTED. WELCOME HOME MISS KUSANAGI ]**

The door unlocked with a series of heavy clicks, and smoothly glided out of the way. The corridor beyond was simple and barebones; dark colored brown, dark beige, and greys, with 60° and 120° hatching patterns. Triangular OLED panels at the edges of ceiling and floor provided an indicat illumination, light cones breaking on the hatching of the wall panels.

She stepped into the pantry, and waved the door close behind her with a hit of a green trigraphic key over a wall panel. The door slid shut and locked and sealed with a series of clanks and a hiss.

With the EM-tight environment re-established, she keyed in the manual sequence that opened the local Net. She accepted the resulting connection and authenticated herself anew.

The simplistic corridor vanished under entoptics overlays, and she stepped out of the pantry and into the midst of the colorful nebula, wisps of green and blue gas drifting through the corridor, seeed with tiny white spheres that radiated entoptic heat.

She turned right and waved her hand through the entoptic key and opened the wardrobe; a piece of the nebula smoothly separated, withdrew into the wall, and aside to reveal a set of hocks and other clothing. A separate compartment on the right held a Shell Suit, a heavy Lockheed Cybernetics Phantom-MX8, sitting together with a set of jackets, a wide leather duster, and two sets of spacer suits; one a civilian model, the other the reinforced navy-blue and white Space variant.

She hang her dark violet coat onto one of the open smart matter hangers, then closed the entire compartment with a two-finger swiping gesture, turning around and stepping into the living room proper.

The wide scenario of Auralis Major greeted her, the colorful grasslands and the schools of floating Kisan drifters, alight with color as their skins shifted in communication.

 **System Warning - Shell Main Power Level: 5%**  
 **30 Minutes Operation Time remaining - Seek Recharge option**

With efficient motions she stripped her clothing on a way towards one of the three rooms that lay adjacent to the round concourse of the living room, removing her casual clothing and underwear, Body Image Perception configurations auto-adjusting to the pseudo-cold they feed the Ego's shell.

The diagnostic and repair bay was a sterile room, large enough to support a heavily segmented couch of various parts held aloft by mechanical arms, and three sets of robotic arms, with two running around on tracks in the floor and one large set of arms hanging from the ceiling on its own waldo. The segmented walls held fabricators and spare part storage; a Kiggs field kept the sterile environment isolated from the rest of the apartment.

When she stepped in, the lighting dimmed up from its UV stand-by, and the cradle stood up to receive her, inlaid OLED strips lighting up blue as the effectors activated.

She let her Shell drop into the suspension field, and awaited the high-bandwidth connectivity port until it pressed against the laser port array in her neck.

DNIs switched modes, and the Ego began synchronization with the system woven into the apartments Infosphere. Fibre-optical backbones connecting the implants on the surface of the brain, or plunging through implanted pathways deeper into its augmented innards, began pulsing with light impulses of hundreds of frequencies, bridging neural impulses and conceptual data from the Ego of Motoko Kusanagi into the massive exocortex network of her apartment. With a last breath of bionic lungs, she exhaled herself out of her Shell, floating outwards and into the digital sphere, watching her sleeve lying inside its suspension cradle, now stiff and motionless. The maintenance arms moved in, and she cached the maintenance logs from Muninns cybernetic bay as well as her own diagnostics, looking on the long list of common and special maintenance jobs.

The replacement leg would need to be detached and replaced with a new version. Already sets of arms were moving in, fractal arms brushing into subunits, forming into screwdrivers and nano-detachment units, beginning to disconnect the outer seal of the bionic limb, then the muscles, followed by fluid and data connections. Inside her Body Image Processing, the limb dropped successively off the net, until the arms disconnected the central joints and the flexible exoskeleton weave and pulled the entire unit of its anchoring mounts, revealing the sealed mould of the attachment limb and the innards of an only part-bionic Hybrid Shell.

Other damage reports were less severe. Joint nanolaminates and gel lubricants had worn out, microfibre damage was reported throughout various muscles where bullets had impacted and biotic fields had torn on the molecular structures, and various high-performance components would require refreshing and exchange. Her biological neuronal architecture desired exotic biological feedstock to maintain its equally exotic neurons, and the ultracap stacks that supplied the Shell with power had been drained severely, with few chances to recharge properly since then.

As another part of her went to work on fixing it all, confluencing with the management AIs of the support bay, she turned to the other tasks of the day. Betas would require reintegration and fresh forking, and cybersphere avatars had run empty, held by ReprAIsentatives in her absence.

Kusanagi's Ego grew and spliced off awareness threads, turning to address the many official and private tasks on her list. Deep down, she let out a phantom sigh.

It was good to be back.

* * *

By now, O'Neil-02 was transitioning to nighttime, for both the biorhythms of its inhabitants and its carefully seeded biosphere. The distant arrays of thousands of individual sparking reflectors visible on the three massive mirror petals of the O'Neil cylinder turned from solid to diffuse as individual reflectors turned away from Arcturus, and other changed their diffusion to generate softer light. At the same time, coatings on the inner sides of the massive, multi-layered windows of transparent alloys and c-allotropes adjusted, and tinged the sunlight further and further into the orange, red, and over into the dark blue of the terrestrial night.

As artificial night lowered itself inside the cylinder in tune with Arcturus complex day-night cycle, the city lights came alive, and the nightlife began in earnest.

Ishikawa parked his Aircar some five minutes of walking away from their destination at a public Skycar Parking tower, an open bionic piece of architecture mimicking a seedpod, that offered access to aircars on all sides.

All in civilian attires, the four Operatives quietly blended into the beginning night live, walking the colorful contoured boulevards with their omnipresent greenery, trigraphic installations, holographic crystal artwork, nanoluminescent water games, and colorful microswarms and -drones hovering about, a million rainbow fireflies and a thousand mobile trigraphic shows. Loud music of a dozen different styles boomed from equally many doors and even more airborne robots, and more drones, androids and bioroids with colorful holographic covers and clothing mixed themselves into the crowds, singling out people by behavior profile and their DisplayID beacons, and avoiding those that clearly signaled no interest as if they had never even considered them, flowing past without a second thought.

The odor of spices, food, drink and alcohol was already heavy in the air, mixing with the odd cloud of StimBots, pheromones, and a thousand fragrances blown into the air to evoke equally many feelings and settings.

But the place the four men were searching for was far less obvious, did not try to slam itself into your face with the power of trigraphic and entoptic advertising that blocked the entire street, with friendly ARvatars, drones, and 'roids of a dozen different risque forms, presenting a simple Neo-Wood style front to the world, and an equally simple trigraphic and enoptic front of piano black, gold, and silver mixed with dark woods accents.

Haggard's Bar was one of many bars run on the station. It was main ground for high level officials seeking a solemn place to exchange words and discuss matters in the evening due to a 'code of silence' practiced by the owner, a former AIS officer by the name of Sebastian Clark who had retired decades ago and built the place up during the Verge Wars as a safe retreat to relax for SA officials working on Arcturus.

All four men accepted the scanning and dusting done by the two bouncers inside the entryway without complaint, and clipped the handed-out redactor devices, small stylish headsets of ribbed black with silver trim, behind their ears to enable monitoring of their implanted cybernetics and PAN, to ensure nobody would record something at Haggard's. It was a good-natured ensurance; the details that could be spoken about here were indeed sensitive, and the AIS accepted places such as this because they enforced a certain form of data containment.

The bar was surprisingly empty for the night. The amount of customer at the tables could be counted by two hands, few of them wearing anything approaching Dress Blues, or having hid them under long coats.

Ishikwa, Borma, Paz and Saito had the bar table entirely for themselves, and ordered up. Clark took their orders in low voice with his usual warm professionalism, and returned with several glasses, bottles and an ash tray only minutes later, tiny beermat-sized drone pads assisting him discretely.

For a minute, there was silence, the four men working glasses and bottles in hand, Paz lighting his first cigarette and drawing a first breath.

Savoring his whiskey, Ishikawa opened: "What a mess."

Borma raised his head slightly, inhaling with a huff. That was the felt third-hundred time Ishikawa had said this since they had cycled down from combat a day earlier.

Saito, popping open his beer, nodded in agreement. "Should have gone better. We got pretty blindsided by their tenacity and options. You've seen how they escaped?"

"Which one you mean? Their escape tunnel and that 'bot lance or a Q-Ship that can hold out against two cruiser and escape?" Ishikawa asked.

"Both."

"Yeah, the Old Ape gonna be screwed by the top brass." Borma interjected. "That is, after they're done panicking about the two big news."

Ishikawa snorted. "They can certainly try. He took worse stuff than this in stride. He's probably gonna spank half of them with a few quiet words. 'Sides, why's he to blame for a cutting-edge Q-ship? OSI are the ones getting roasted here for letting that one slip." He checked if anyone had heard him; his voice has markedly risen during the last few sentences.

"Oh, and it's three big news actually." Paz corrected while lighting up another cigarette. "Remember the intel the Major recovered during the op? She blinked during that call. You don't see her blink. At all. Not even during that arrest we pulled earlier. There she was just furious."

Everyone digested the moment for a second.

Borma broke the silence. "That's not good."

Paz tapped his cigarette on the ash tray. "Understatement. This could bite us in the ass. Not 'us' us, 'whole Alliance' us.

"The Old Ape won't be replaced. He's too damn valuable, and got too much cover and support, that's how he got us where we are in the first place. No, this either goes up or gets buried. And I don't think they intend to bury it. Not if this could seriously undermine the Aliance's standing in the galaxy," Paz elaborated, puffing his cigar then exhaling a big cloud of smoke.

"The Council?"

"Might be. I would not surprised if the Spectres came knocking at our doorstep and start asking questions. Don't quote me on that though. 'specially if it comes true."

"I mean, it could happen", Borma said thoughtfully. "If that I-Wep's as bad as it is, and we don't manage to catch it before it crosses Alliance borders, whether real or virtual…"

"Shit. Storm", Ishikawa interrupted. "Once that package is into the galactic extranet, you got a million solar system and a hundred trillion servers. Spread out over billions of cubic lightyears. 'Needle in a haystack' would be an understatement."

"And the only people with the expertise and tools to even get a trace of it, much less produce a vaccine and contain it, are locked down in human space because of jurisdiction bullshit", Borma concluded, downing the last of his bear in frustration.

Paz suddenly turned to his Omni-Tool. "Gotta bail. Have to ask a few persons about this bullshit."

Ishikawa finished up his whiskey. "How Corleone adds up to this?" As Paz' former 'employer', Paz had access to the Corleone Family's intelligence, provided if their patriarch was in the mood.

"No idea. That's why I'm asking. Saito, come on." Paz flashed his omnitool to pay his drinks, swiping through an enoptic bill on the counter to transfer the credits.

"You want me to to drive you?", Ishikawa asked as the two stood up.

"Nah, but thanks. Cab's already on the way, quickslot is two minutes away. See you two tomorrow. And bring replacement clothing. Got a feeling we're gonna need it after the meeting." The two left through the door, clipping their devices off.

"Have a nice night, Sirs", one the bouncers was audible before the door clicked close.

Borma played with his bottle for a second, then drained its contents as well. "So what's your opinion about this?"

Ishikawa took another sip from his whisky, nearly emptying the glass.

"We both know how bad this could be. Now, I had only roundabout an hour of Jack-time to look at the code, but what we have here… it's too good. Beyond bleeding-edge."

He emptied his glass in one last big swig.

"...And I am starting to suspect one of our Hypercorp's involved in this one. This code has to come from a bigger outfit. Thing's just, the code was scrubbed. Professionally. My identifier software ran empty. Not a single match with any well-known hats we have on file."

"So they scrubbed the code? That would require an AI if we can't get a trace."

"More importantly, a top-of-the-line scrubber AI. Again, corp and government stuff. Nobody else has access to the R&D resources to make the SOTA turnaround cycle on scrubber AI of that effectiveness."

"Unless the OFIF started pooling resources and got themselves an AI congruence to do their State of the Art coding work for their ECM... "

"Yeah, but if that was the case", Borma cut him off, "why did our AIs cut through their ECM at the OFIF hideout so easy?"

"...limited resources?", Ishikawa ventured.

"And then we're back at square one" Borma shook his head in disagreement. "Also, even if they had the infrastructure for the SATO coding: Where would they get the intel from to keep themselves updated? That would require connections…"

"...which would make it easier to trace them." Ishikawa worked his beard. "Yeah, this just doesn't work out."

He stared into his glass.

"Tell you what, let's go visit my Pachinko place, get some intel from that direction."

"I'm in." Both men waved their hands through their own bills, and stood up. "Evening, Sebastian," Ishikawa said goodbye.

"Good evening to you too, Gentlemen. And don't forget, this saturday is 'Intel Day'." Clark winked with one eye. The calendar notification popped up on Ishikawa's ARO in the same second. "Thanks." He removed his Redactor, leaving it with the indicated silver tablet where you could deposit used ones, and stepped out the door.

A teenager watched Ishikawa and Borma head back to their aircar from a nearby terrace, opposite of the bar. After seeing Ishikawa's car lift itself into the darkening sky, she muttered to herself:

"I blink, don't I?"

* * *

 **TECHNOLOGY / SECURITY**

 **Ghost Keys**

Ghost Keys are hidden key sequences either already present or placed into a Ghost for authentication purposes. Encrypted in other neuronal patterns such as ghost memories or core personality identifiers, as apparent memory artefacts, or neuro-encoded digital code, their purpose is to serve as an extreme secure, deeply hidden authentication measure that will be compromised by serious Ghost Hacking attempts or a "Coring" (Replacing one Ghost with another) and thus automatically alert security measures that the authenticating Ghost has been compromised in some manner.

Artificially inserted Ghost Keys require professional Psychosurgery to insert and require regular maintenance to combat natural drift and decay of the core sequences; as such the most common Ghost Keys are core identifiers of the Ghost in person already present at the time a Ghost Key is generated; Artificial Ghost Keys are only used by few people with extreme security concerns.

 **ENTERTAINMENT / HUMANITY**

 **Experience Playback**

Experience Playback, short XP, is an advanced form of neuro-recording and -playing system designed to record and play back exteroceptive, interoceptive, and emotive tracks of an Ego. Exteroceptive tracks include the traditional senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste that process the outside world. Interoceptive tracks include senses originating within the body, such as balance, a sense of motion, pain, hunger and thirst, and a general sense of the location of one's own body parts. Emotive tracks include the whole spectrum of emotions which can be aroused in a transhumans. Depending on the level of immersion and track overlaying used during the playback of an XP, the user can be completely immersed in the situation that generated the XP, and the person feelings. As such, it is also often compared to "stepping into the shoes of the recorder."

Accessing and recording XPs requires at the least perceptive intercepts (as provided by every cyberbrain casing) or full Inserts; further implants are optional but can increase the fidelity of the XP, potentialy enoourmusly.

As a form of media, XPs form a cornerstone of the modern transhuman society; Lifebloggers and -Streamers use XPs as much as people generating XPs about their work, social life, sport activities (extreme sport XPs especialy enjoy continous popularity) or holidays, for consumption in private, by family and relatives, by friends or in public. Another big, if not encouraged form of XPs are War XPs, popular before and popular after the First Contact War.

Cross-species XPs are, due to their direct neuronal format, challenging but not impossible. Compatible with the Citadel-standard Total Sensorium Interface, the amount of cross-species Experience playbacks and compability in not only exteroceptive, but alos interoceptive and emotice tracks has been increasing steadily.

 **Memons / Digital Memory Storage and Transfer**

Another outbirth of the age of effecting DNIs with the capability to actively shape and rewire neuronal connections and the introduction of semi-artificial hybridized NRH-neurons was the capability to digitalize, down- and upload and store entire memories. Commonly refered to as "Memons", such modern memories can be freely shared, or sold and bought, and then downloaded by anyone with apporpiate Implants. Depending on the memon in question, integration can be smoothly or the memory can be recognized as foreign.

Due to the very reliable way the modern transhuman mind stores memories in an almost protographic manner, especialy when implanted with Memon implants, the thus-generated memories tend to be crystal-clear and inclusive, capturing most aspects of the encoded experience in total clarity. However, Memons are subject to subjective drift - Even with modern conceptual translation techniques, different Ghosts tend to interpretate memons in subtly different ways, highlighting or changing minute aspects of the larger memory according to their interpretation of the world.

* * *

 **NEW WORDS:**  
 **Auralis Major:** Continent of New Eden, colonial world in the Xi Boötis Alpha Star System. Famous for its wide planes and complex, part-aeromotile fauna. Regular feature of photography magazines due to the light shows that unfold on the planes, especialy in the morning and evening.  
 **Kumanambir leather:** A form of leather made from the hide of an heard animal on the Core colony of Darwin. Desired for its exotic surface structure and coloring sceme.


	16. Consequences Pt 3

**[ SAIN / CICOMNET ]**  
[ Connecting to MILGALCOM NETWORK… Connection authenticated ]  
[ Connecting to SAIN/CITADEL…]  
[ ENCRYPTION AUTHENTICATION ]  
[ Connecting to private communication system ]  
 **[ Connection opened… awaiting Pick-up... ]**

Togusa plopped down onthe edge of one of the seats that faced the massive multimedia wall screen, staring at the interface as he waited for his wife and children to connect from Citadel-side.

As a government employee, Togusa enjoyed extranet privileges as soon as the tightbeam left Alliance space; his communication was riding the military-reserved, extreme-capacity tightbeam line the Systems Alliance had installed from the Citadel Corridor through the Core Rings to the Citadel itself, encrypted all the way to Alliance CITCOM, and routed on a less but still heavily encrypted connection to the joint-operated highrise complex for Alliance citizens his wife and children lived in.

[ Connection accepted ]

The grey placeholder screen exploded into voxels, zooming away into infinity, molding the shapes of the apartments living room out of rapidly stabilizing color voxels. It gained in fidelity and sharpness by the millisecond until it had created a perfect image of the other side.

It seemed like two rooms, separated by 30,000 light years, had just been bridged together perfectly in an instant; and in a way, they were.

"Hey, Saori". He smiled warmly.

"Christian." She made eye contact, and in that single second so much unsaid flew across the small distance of space. He closed his eyes and breathed in deep once.

It was always good to see them, see hear. That warm smile, the eyes, the lovely shape of her face, the way her hair fell on her clothing.

It was a deep reminder of what Togusa worked for, whom he was protecting - and that even in the abyss of darkness he stared into, jumped into every day, there was light and embracing comfort.

"Hey Dad." Kat had taken refuge in one of the comfortable armchairs, legs casually swung over the right rest, wearing jeans and some unknown, vaguely t-shirt looking piece of clothing. His ARO piqued the clothing in question as a joint human-asari design, currently en-vogue among both species teenagers (equivalents.) So they were shopping today.

The fourth member of the family was missing however.

"Where's Mir?-"

"BOOH!" Mirai Togusa, his younger daughter, jumped straight into the center of the image from where she had been hiding outside of his field of view.

Implants clamped down on the shock and surprise immediately, feeding control impulses to modified neurons and force-grown clusters. The adrenal shock stopped in its early steps, and Togusa would have only jolted minimally. For Mirai's sake, he faked a good jolt and began laughing.

"There you are!", he called out, and for a second mimicked as if he was going to jump through the holographic screen and start chasing her.

She smiled brightly. _Finally_ she had surprised Papa Christian again! Then she dove onto the couch with a laughing scream, and continued giggling there, as Saori laid an arm around her. "Come here, you", she laughed as she hugged her daughter,

Christian and Saori exchanged another warm smile. The family was happy, and socializing despite the distance and the fact they had not seen their father in true Shell for two weeks now.

The scene made Togusa's heart ache; he wanted to see his family again for real, not through some holograph, avatar, or in the Vir.

"So, Togusa, how is everything on your end? I only got your ReprAIsentative earlier today, and he said you were off the net for a day now. Was it another operation?"

"Yeah."

Kat peaked; she always liked to hear as much as possible, which only forced Togusa to watch his word that more carefully. Scuttlebug in this day and age was a powerful intel tool in its own right, and Togusa had no doubt, but actual indications that the STG was trying to spy on his family to get more Intel on Section 9 and himself.

"We had an OP in coreward space; it went well at large but… I got a few scratches." He refrained from lifting his shirt and looking at the rapidly healing patches of fresh skin in his lower torso where the surgeon suite had picked shrapnel from the grenades out of his flesh.

"It's so good to see you again." He clamped down on a few tears that bubbled up somewhere deep in his Ghost, streaking towards the surface mind. He could talk about that with Saori, later on. But not in front of the kids, especially Mirai.

"So… you're okay dad?"

"Obviously." He spread his arms and cracked a smile. Kat returned it.

"And you got some new clothing? That the latest style? Or was Lucenthi?"

Lucen'thi Vasir was one of Kat's closest friends on the Academy; herself a young equivalent of an asari teenager and largely down to earth, which appealed to Kat more than the swarms of asari teenagers which seemed to go after friendships with human "cousins" just because they could be friends with a human - apparently a prized social statute in Asari society, given there weren't many humans in physical shells to begin with, and having a friendship with a transhuman was more commonly seen as odd that desirable, an attitude that confused Kat personally. It wasn't like a transhuman was that fundamentally different from him, and a Shell was just that - a Shell. A superficial surface layer. The Ghost underneath was in her opinion far more important, but even the quasi-telepathic asari seemed to struggle with the idea. Kat had had more than one discussion elaborating the concept and its implications.

"It was _Luthi's_ idea. And it's comfortable and looks awesome, even if the PAN integration and the SMCloth features are… lacking. I'm still wearing my 'shirt under it for that."

She turned some more to show off the complex alien weave patterns and unique cuts, sleeve cuffs and hem cut in angles, and a second layer of colorful cloth strips sewed over the primary clothing layer.

Asari Ksevaren letters were written across the breast, right arm and down the left side; heavily stylized and permuted with various human scriptures, according to Togusa's ARO.

"Looks very nice", Togusa remarked sincerely.

"Thanks."

"When are you going to come home again?", Mirai asked from her position on the couch.

 _Ah dammit. And here comes the bomb of the evening._

"I can't guarantee anything, sorry. We're currently getting one case after the next, and I only have this much time now because we're returning from an OP… if I'm lucky, I can come somewhere next week."

 _Which might not happen, depending on what we dug out of that hideout._

"They should give you the time", Mirai said with absolution. "You work so hard, they can't demand that you're there all the time."

"Sorry, Miri, but it isn't that easy."

" _Why not_? Aren't you like, a top-secret agent? They can do _anything_!"

"Nope, we can't." He smiled. "Even we have our rules and oversights. Besides, what I do is slightly different from simply disappearing from work for two days."

"That's _stupid_!" Mirai crossed her arms. Kat silently rolled her eyes, and Saori began stroke her young daughters hair.

"Look, I can always get a Surrogate if nothing else. And I'll definitely get the time for that."

"...I guess that's okay", Mirai conceded. Her tone said it really wasn't.

 _Sorry, my little star, but that is how life is._

 _...sometimes I wished our children already had a perspective on how much time we have. It's not like we're ever going to run out of time together._

"-ogusa? Togusa, you there?"

He was ripped out of his thoughts. "What, sorry, I was thinking."

Saori's gaze said: _And I know exactly about what._

"I said the Surrogate idea could work. Or we go into a Vir together on the weekend, maybe get some of Kats friends in as well."

"That would be awesome!" He empathized his opinion with a slightly too bright smile.

"Isn't it?"

"Also, dear, how was your day at work?"

"About average, I'd say. We're making progress, but it's slow work. Mostly because some of the colleagues are still uncomfortable with the idea of the new Lab AI. Einstein's very lively and loves to chat - With everyone at once. Apparently that's part personality, part of his stimulative program designed to feed people with ideas. It's not working so well with some. Especially when the colleagues have him on loudspeakers instead of Inserts. Kassius nearly lost his mind when he heart Einstein from three places at once."

"I thought Citadel research VIs were the same?"

"From my own experience working in their labs? Yes. They aren't that different, beyond the heavier networking and intuition Einstein delivers. So... blame it on the AI factor."

"You'd think they'd be more accepting by now. It's been over thirty years since first contact and we've had AI for two centuries. Nothing's gone wrong yet."

"Well, remember that the quarians operated the geth and other very good AIs for roughly the same period… and then they had the Geth Rebellions. There's still insistence in some circles that it's only a matter of time until our AIs bite us in the arse and rebel as well."

"Wishful thinking. We're not idiots", Kat waved the point off. Togusa shrugged with his shoulders.

"Also, we treat our AI way differently. The quarians had a massive civil war and an AI rebellion over their issue. It's not like we had that."

"Well, not in that way, sure." _Though the Neo-Luddites would probably disagree with you. For them, it was a war by the end. Crazy bastards._

"Anyway, we think we can get a breakthrough on the transspecies neuro-translation issue within a few months. Working off Asari engrams to prune translator LAIs off them was a great idea, even if we needed this long for permission. Give it another year, and we could talk a breakthrough in interspecies neurocommunication."

"So… two years until its an actual breakthrough?" Togusa asked teasingly.

"Christian!" But Saori's eyes laughed, and it burst out of Togusa.

Kat joined in, and soon they all flopped around on the ground, boundlessly laughing their asses off.

It felt great.

They ended the family call in a good mood, hugging each other goodbye across the screen in AR. It was only simulated, Inserts splicing the feelings of touch into their perception, but for a second, Togusa could belief he was really hugging his daughters, that they were there inside a shared space and not so mind bendingly far away.

Then Togusa settled in for bed, and a different, private talk with his wife.

"So, Christian, how bad was it really?"

They were meeting inside a private Vir environment, modelled after a shared bedroom that fused the two apartments down the middle.

In response, he just embraced her desperately, trying to fit himself as close to her form as possible, and began sobbing.

"Hey, hey…" her hands worked on his back, assuredly. "Christian." He took a sobbing breath. "Christian." She forced him back a bit to look in his eyes with hers, those elegantly swung brows and striking brown-green iris that had caught his attention all those years ago. Then she kissed him, lightly, on the lips.

Finally, he got himself back under control.

"During the OP, when we were preparing to breach one room… they counter-attacked, fired around a dozen grenades into our position. I got thrown around, and browned out…"

His wife raised an eyebrow. "Browned out?"

He took a deep breath to steady himself, opening the hug to drop down on the beds rim. "That's what… what the military calls it when your brain gets punched about enough that it stops working properly. When that happens, the implants jump in for damage control, and in our cases, a set of AIs takes over to keep us alive and fighting while your brain gets kitted back together.

"And… and I saw… saw us all on a meadow on Arcturus, from the holiday 3 months ago. And it was so close. Without my armor, I'd be… be only an Infomorph right now, waiting for a new Shell. They still had to pick shrapnel out of my abdomen and upper legs."

Her left hand massaged his back, slowly, reassuredly.

" _It was so close_." He started sobbing again.

"Christian, you have a Stack. A military-grade one. You wouldn't even suffer Instance loss."

"Yeah, but I also… never died. And when that… that moment happened… I thought… I thought I was _dead or dying_. And it scares me. I don't want to go out like that. Violent bodyloss is... " he couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. More memories flashed, unimpeded with his implants in sleep mode, of his partner Valentine, bleeding out from gutshots before his eyes, struggling for a futile two minutes as he begged Togusa to just end it, the rookie cop unable, paralyzed as another human being struggled, obediently following its brainstem that told the brain the body was dying, survival instinct struggling even as death laid its scythe upon the Shell.

The academic knowledge of the Stack in the back, still obediently mapping out and storing every piece of neuronal activity and connectdome change, and storing them inside the high-density piece of mem- and comp-crystal encased by a shell of c-allotropes, had not helped at all.

The psychosurgeon had done its best, but short of entirely excising the memory, removing the flashbacks entirely was largely impossible; and the woman had not been talented enough to apply professional Shocklocks or other measures of containment. Togusa had never let someone else fix the issue for good, or got more conditioning to deal with the PTDS. He wanted to deal with the memories for good, not just bury them under neuroprogramming.

It was a damn hard choice to uphold.

Another kiss ripped him out of his thoughts, and virtual hands reached for the implants.

A soothing rush of arousing clearness rushed into his awareness, and the room came back into focus as virtual tears subsided.

He broke the kiss for a moment to press out a muffled "Sry", then sank back into it, just letting her presence remind him that everything was alright.

"Christian, there is nothing to be sorry for. I'd be more worried if you weren't reacting at all."

He dropped down on his side of the bed, memories flickering to Saito, Batou, the Major. _How many ghosts are they carrying around inside their heads? Batou… was at Torfan, got a Star for it. The Major… was there as well, or at least they met each other during the Verge War. Saito was Blue Suns, saw the scummy underbelly of galactic society, wared in the Terminus systems for one Warlord or the next._

Should probably ask Batou about this tomorrow.

Saori dropped down besides him, and for a while they just enjoyed each others presence in silence.

Then she rolled over until she laid on top of him, and suddenly he realized just how close they were. She smiled mischievously. "Let's get your mind occupied with something different."

He had no problem with that.

* * *

At the same time 30,000 lightyears and just a few kilometers away, Pilot Officer 3rd Class Turmer Kirrahe, 4th of his Hatch of House of march Kisheraver Isher'Solus'Aver'sidar, was busily running the exterior inspection of his charge, the _Siav'eris Blade_ , dark augmented eyes flickering across the stealth-paneled exterior, checking every black-green panel for scratches or damage, perfectly smooth and fitted on edge, only broken up by the opened hatches exposing utility feed docks, mechanical attachments, and open airlocks.

With a critical eye, he checked the four swinging "wings" with their hollow centers that flanked the dagger-shaped spaceframe of the _Kashir_ -class Stealth Operations Frigate, holding the Frigate's main radiators and four big nacelles stuffed full with cutting-edge multi-vector fusion drives for maneuvering.

The squeaking of wheels on polymer floor alerted him to the arrival of one of the hangar scooters, a low-slung cargo model used for shifting crates and personnel.

Ishara T'Varos, Chief Propulsion Engineer, was the driver, SOT Tech and Signal Specialists Voto'Leelas besides her. T'Varos was already in spacecraft engineering gear, wearing a thick reinforced E-suit designed for direct work inside the innards of spacecraft engineering compartments, radiation-shielded and with an internal cooling system all fitted into a slim package that could be squeezed around corners. Only the reinforced shape of her helmet wasn't mated to the pressure seal around her chin.

Voto'Leelas vas _Siav'eris Blade_ nar Xas'Itan was wearing his standard ashore Envirosuit configuration, with his reik displaying its brilliant violett-and-blue tri- and hexagon-based patterns of the 'Itan Task Force, 19th of the heavy Fleet, with no combat operations gear or other kits attached to the Envirosuit base, a simple flexible pressure suit without visible linear frames or bulky attachments. How the quarians had managed to pull that feat off had been the center of more than one discussion back in his SUFAM days. _Because they're really good engineers, that's what._

The two disembarked and keyed in a group of service mechs to begin shifting creates aboard. "Evening, T'Varos", Kirrahe said, nodding. "How's the Core?"

"Sympathizing like a _Sourvas_ ", she said in her low, husky voice. "Once we've finished spinning up the secondaries, we'll boost it into ready-power."

"Wonderful. The boss is making pressure. Another hour and we're supposed to be internal and detaching. Anybody know what this is about?" He turned to Voto'leelas.

"Sorry, but no. Commander hasn't talked about anything beyond that we're shifting out ASAP and that our Op is in Greater Council Space. Also, no immediate combat alert, so we're just talking. For the moment."

"Given the… history of our employee, that is not going to last. Sorry, but I have a core and two reactors to tend to." T'varos turned to enter through the aft personal airlock. "Kirrahe, if you could be on your station in about fiteen or twenty minutes when we spin up the core to ready-power, that would be great. I want to run checks on our propulsion eezonics immediately afterwards."

"Check. Good spin-up. Don't wreck her please." He blinked with one eye, trying to intimidate the Asari-style one.

"I will try, but _no_ promises."

For a second, the salarian and the quarian just watched her depart.

"Right, last area to check is the nose, then we can get aboard and comfortable."

They walked along the multi-tiered pier of the Citadel Joint Special Forces Docks Section 2 towards the smooth, rounded nose of the _Siav'eris Blade_ , slightly gleaming under the intense illumination of the bays ceiling- and structure-mounted light stripes, showing the fine seems were hatches hid away RCS arrays and retracted sensor arrays.

The armor plating was spotless, freshly repaired from the rigors of a month of space operations, spotting no abrasions or impact craters. The two canyons dug into the nose-ward ventral armor surface from a recent skirmish in the Terminus had been similarly repaired.

Still, Turmer checked every centimeter squared of the hull, all the while reading and confirming individual points on his checklist in lock-step with the VI.

" _Check OK. Forward RCS Hatch, Lateral 2_."

"Sealed and locked. No damage."

" _Check OK. Lateral Sensor Array, Scanning RADAR, Arrays 1 and 2_."

"No visual scratches or damage to array covers, smooth seals."

" _Check OK. Forward Visual Sensor_ -"

"You know, nothing's out of order. She's perfectly down to Specs, no scratches or bad fittings."

The pilot turned around to the quarian, just catching the glimmer of arrays of lenses underneath the visor as their innate, OLED-enabled glow vanished back into the obscurity of the darkly tinted glass.

Voto'Leelas had a supernatural eye for details, deficiencies and disorders; Kirrahe didn't know how and, frankly, it scared him a little. Quarians were known to have extensive implants and some of the smartest Personal Computing Environments in their Envirosuits since ever, but the smooth shapes of the sealed suits never gave away what capabilities were hidden away underneath them.  
Given that 'Leelas was from the Heavy Fleet - and thus a military spacecraft - this could very well be the quarian attitude for best performance and maintenance under all possible circumstances, augmented by the VI harems quarians walked about with themselves, talking. Or maybe there was more. The scuttlebug among the crew certainly was that there was more, but Voto'Leelas was a withdrawn individual, only around with the other team members or in his cabin. That he talked with anyone else at all in his modulated voice seemed like a miracle at times, but allowed a lively character to shimmer through.

Wheels Be Turning, the quarians had every due cause to be reserved. Word of incidents drifted back into the ship more than once, the best of them ending with bruised egos, the worst (especially in the more despicable places of the galaxy) with shots and demolished bars.

"Let's get aboard, shall we?"

"Right." Kirrahe keyed his Omnitool. "Inspection Log, continuing: Visual pre-flight inspection was finished with no complaints or faults. Will now be moving to internal pre-flight checks, including avionics and propulsion eezonics. Log, stop." His personal VI gave a series of chirps as it processed and filled the dictation and filled in some more spaces in the pre-flight checklist.

The voice of another salarian echoed across the deck of the docking pier: "Hey! You guys getting ready to move?"

Already at the forward personal airlock, Kirrahe and Voto'Leelas turned around to face the source of the shout.

Itok Kazus, ex-Union soldier and now Spectre Team Tech specialist, rested easily on a crate next to the lowered ramp of THICS F/LR/A/X-1552 _Lightspear_ , a bottle of something in one three-fingered hand and sitting next to a conspicuous amount of what looked like weapons storage cases. Behind him, a curvey industry-orange salarian loading robot partially decorated with a quarian-style pin-up of the Lightspear drawing curved, blue-white contrails across the sky was stomping up the ramp, another military cargo pallet secured in its arms.

"Yes. We're internal in one hour. What about you?"

Itok waved off-hand to the ramp and the cargo space beyond. "Mostly doing post-OP re-arming. Nihlus and Larix are off meeting some contact, and Raetor is still crawling around inside engineering."

Kirrahe eyed the supplies still ashore. "Just how much ammunition did you guys use on your OP? TWO racks of ATG-4500 _Harsveavels_?" The palettes with the sleek white salarian Air-to-Ground missiles stood slightly separate, marked with big trigraphic "Caution, High Explosive" signs. "And… are those ten crates of Grenades? Paths of the Wheel, what did you do?"

"Hey, War Robots are tough, okay? And with the augmentation proliferation in the Verge and Terminus, the good old drill of 'Ten Grenades for one problem' holds more true than ever." He patted a Type-166 _Vemon-_ 4R Assault Weapon that laid, uncollapsed, next to him.

"Or maybe you're just an explosion-addicted _Creshac_."

"Not like it hasn't paid off…" Itok patted his breastplate. Dozens of differently shaped and colored miniature figures had been micro-spray-painted onto both wings of the breastplate as well as around the Spectre Insignias on both shoulder pauldrons. Robots, the armored shapes of various species, several vehicles, all of them with colored accents and highlights. It was a brazen and visible declaration of skill, a kill talley build over a decade.

More kill tallies were painted on the side of _Lightspear_ underneath the turian _kesheon_ writing of its name, painted there by Valtha Lisir, pilot, and the gunnery crew of the Frigate.

Kirrahe conceded the point with a silent, reluctant nod.

"Have a nice evening, Itok. We're off." Voto stepped off and down into the airlock, though he did not order the system to cycle just yet.

Kirrahe parted ways with another silent nod, then headed swiftly to the airlock. By any other species standard safe perhaps the quarians, he was outright running into it.

The outer doors hissed shut, and the pilots thought drifted back to checklists and cockpit controls.

* * *

The apartment was middle-sized and in many ways unnotable and standardized, one of thousands in Starscrapers across the Citadel. The only massive distinction was a difference in price tag explained by a true window that overlooked the zenith-ward expanse of Tayseri ward with a big diamanoid slap vacuum-sealing the outside against the space just beyond, with a thinner inner, multimedia-enabled window providing the actual enclosure of the apartment, encased inside the outer pressure shell of the Starscraper.

Right now the apartment was deserted in a state of perfect order; the green lights blinking next to a smoothly wall-integrated cabinet which had just absorbed a swarm of disk-shaped cleaning robots crawling on legs and flying on repulsor fields. The windows were halfway polarized, blocking out the intense light of Widow, and the interior lights had been turned off entirely, conserving their power.

The apartment VI dimming the lights to a low, comfortable orange-white was the first sign that its owner was approaching. They revealed the orderly separated sections of the apartment, the heavy tapestry that served as decoration and separation, and the two mannequins standing on carefully masoned granite-like rock, surrounded by black obsidian gravel, stiffly presenting two bulky armors with military camouflage, opposite of a simple open wardrobe, lit by a complex artisan OLED fixture above them.

The apartment door unlocked and parted, opening the pantry to the turian standing outside. His shape was cloaked by a long coat and thin synthetic fibre clothing styled with silver belts that hid his bulky appearance, though a black, modified Carnifex rested easily in a black quickdraw holster at the man's right hip. A low hat with a wide brim, black like the rest of the clothing, shadowed his head.

He easily stepped inside and relieved himself of the small bag he had on his back, straps extended so it could fit over his bulky shoulders. It landed at the bottom of the wardrobe. The coat was next, carefully slipped off shoulders and hump and settled onto a moulded coat hock.

Then the hands moved to unbuckle the belts, and the black synthetic clothing slid off the light combat armor worn underneath it had obscured from prying eyes, a moulded hardshell set with underlying powered E-suit, colored blue with silver highlights. SmartStrips that had held the long pollover and trousers together over the armor released easily as a single finger hit the marked spots on the smart clothing.

An open AutoFolder accepted the clothing and began wiring as it settled the thin cloth back into shape.

The turian moved into the apartment proper, waving off the VI even as it began greeting him, pale blue eyes inspecting the arrangements. He sighed, gazing upon the perfect arrangement of household items, the cleaned furniture and removed food items, remains perfectly arranged on the counter of the kitchen were possible or, clearly visible and helpfully outlined through the holographic see-through door, inside the fridge.

 _I really need to get a better VI. This complete order is going to drive me nuts at some point, and with me being away so often the Bots have far too much time to remove my controlled chaos._

He began murmuring a dictate to himself, a visor flaring to life as he did, implants in his throat and mouth catching the complex vibrations of the _kesheonenar_ , sub-harmonics resonating with the mood and emphasis of its speaker in complex patterns.

The VI accepted the dictate and projected a tiny ARgraphic confirmation in his vision, a new reminder slipping into the calendar that occupied part of the dashboard interface. Then the ARO collapsed back into inactivity, only maintaining discrete elements in its user's vision, projected there by the tiny film implants nanorobots had grown behind the cornea and before the Iris at age 16.

Another set of implants had been installed at the same time, two tiny capsules a surgical robot had planted at the back of the head via a carefully maneuver, sliding it between the rims of two plates and into the tissue around the brain. Nanorobots had done the rest, assembling tiny nanometer-scale structures from precursor structures injected into the tissue, creating connections to the auditory nerves.

The ringtone of the encrypted CICom telephone only existed as high-fidelity neuronal stimulations that shunted auditory signals atop of the neuronal signals emerging from the ears.

"Sir?"

" _Sorry to call you at this hour; I know you are already home and probably want to find some sleep_."

 _Yeah, I kind of want to…_

"What is it about?" The signals of the subcatan vocalizer implant raced down a signal implant around the throat and up the spine, meeting at a tiny implanted computer resting at the left side of the head; more nanofibres penetrated one plate and connected with inductive communication devices grown in the outer cartilage of the plate, and the visor just beyond, core of the turians PAN.

" _I know you wanted a special mission for some time, and so far I could not provide on this offer. Well, that has changed. I have a special opportunity that can use your skills, and you could profit from as well._ "

"Very well. Color me interested."

" _Get to the Spectre Docks within 45 minutes; we'll be internal in about an hour, departing shortly afterwards. Travel time is long enough for you to catch some sleep on the way to our destination, where we will remain for the foreseeable future. From there on out, operations time is indefinite_."

"Understood Sir, I'll be there. If I may ask, where are we heading?"

" _Arcturus, Vakarian, Core Alliance Space. Arcturus Station to be precise. The transhumans have a problem that requires… special resources and capabilities to address, and they are very concerned about it, enough to appoint a special session with the Council - Closed and classified. We'll be operating with one of their paramilitary security agencies. I know you wanted a job in transhuman space, and a big Operation for some time. Well, this is it. See you there. Bau, out_."

Well, would you look at that. The meal and sleep was forgotten, right hand twitching as his virtual hand keyed up instructions in his ARO in coordination with subvocalized commands. He had a travel bag to pack and family and friends to contact. Executor Pallin was one of the first he called and informed. The man's reaction was cold, and indifferent, with a stern warning: "Look, Vakarian, I know you wanted this opportunity, but please, stay calm and within the boundaries of the law. You cannot enforce the law if you break it at every step and turn, remember that."

"Yessir." He was overjoyed when he cut the connection. Pallin… was a good man, but too much by the book. He had agreed to the offer in the first place because he wanted something else, something where his talents mattered, where he could… change something for real. C-SEC had seemed like a good place to start, after he had left the military behind… but it hadn't been.

 _But this one,_ Garrus Vakarian thought as he gulped down a quick glass of fruity Kashear juice, _this one could be it. Me lucky sonofabitch._

 _...Dad's not going to be overjoyed. Titans may care, I don't. This is MY chance!_

He hummed happily to himself. Today was a good day.

* * *

 **NEW WORDS:**  
 _Siav'eris Blade_ : A salarian philosophy somewhat comparable to the human problem-solving principle of "Occams razor".  
 _Sourvas_ : A Thessia-native, formerly amphibic domestic animal somewhat comparable to the human dog or cat; priced as companions. When groomed, they tend to generate a complex, subharmonics-heavy sound.  
 _Creshac:_ (Well-meaning) salarian insult that combines an accusation of insanity or idiocy and a penchant for mischief and destruction. Commonly exchanged among salarian (ex-)military personnel.  
 _kesheon_ : The "Language of War", kesheon is a dialect/extension of the common _keshturieni_ , "Language of the People".  
 _kesheonenar_ : A creole language most widespread in the coreward turian regions, deriving itself from _keshturieni_ and _kesheon_.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** This update's coming with lots of shout-outs. One shoutout goes to LogicalPremise and this incredible worldbuilding, which served to inform at least parts of the species culture or the basics of our own worldbuilding.

Another shoutout goes to Fluoxetine and his stories Parallel Processing and Exitium and the crew of Spectre Nihlus which features in both, and as a cameo here as well. Keep building ludicrous weapons, Itok!

So yeah. That was our first character interlude. With the next chapter we'll dive back into the rabbit hole… it is time to dig deeper, and find out what junction that darn animal dived down!


	17. Welcome to Section 9 Pt 1

_How do you explain the transhuman perspective on neurosecurity to someone who doesn't have the cultural perspective to understand it?_

Aramaki had been pondering that exact question ever since he had finished the morning information précis courtesy of the EYESIGHT intelligence management system at 7:10 AM Arcturus Station local, 20 minutes after he had come to work. Even with 30 years of contact, in his experience most Citadel sophonts lacked the perspective to truly grasp the terror Major Kusanagi and her unit had dug out of the cryogenic rock of Cedatis Station.

For them, full-cognition interfacing, the reality of ego and Ghost, the idea that minds were so utterly malleable they could be press-ganged into new personalities by someone with the right software, skills and the will to utterly compromise a Ghost in such a way was at best a bleeding-edge breakthrough, a revolution in the making instead of an accepted, stabilized reality - at worst it was a laughed-at concept, dismissed as impossible, alien thoughts, and rationalized away.

The second reaction was, from a cultural point of view, frustrating. From a logical point of view, and with a little AI-nudged research in then-humanity's own past, it became more accessible.

The Citadel species had DNIs. Quite effective ones at that in the areas where they were in use. But these DNIs had never escalated to the thoroughness and the neuromodificative capabilities of transhuman DNIs; braincases were essentially unheard off, Skill downloading, memory transfers, Ego uploading, whole-sale ego cogno-augmentation and modification were niche, extremely expensive, or non-existent. What stood out was a general unwillingness to mess with the mind in profound ways. Augmentation yes, but no deep, intrusive changes. Philosophy and public opinion had largely, and after various disasters, pretty thoroughly grinded personal augmetics to a halt at the palace of the own mind, to keep it one's own mind. Which explained the dismissal. Sheer cultural inertia had carried this foundation over into the current times.

People now were afraid of losing control of their head and what happened within it as then-humanity had been back then in the 21st century about the same technological-sociological developments. Patterns mirrored themselves across species and cultures where they shouldn't, but then every species seemed to have their fundamental issues with subjectivity, relativity, and it's own constructivist philosophies. The fundamental fear of not being _oneself_ , not being in _control_ , was seemingly found in every sophont and their cultural spheres. Just like then-humanity, they would adapt. They were adapting, the fast-thinking salarians at the forefront, other cultures behind them.

But that didn't take care of the _here and now_. Salarians were maybe the best equipped to handle what he was about to unveil, turians potentially close behind. The asari had their form of… neurosecurity, but that was more about clothing, social etiquette and intuition than hard, neuroinformatic facts.

Bosoun would have his hands and feet full with explaining the theoretical foundations and implications of NOVUS SPIRITUS, a note Aramaki's Muse forked off immediately and relayed to the Chief Analysts of Neurosoftware at Cyberanalytics.

Aramaki delegated the question at the back of his mind - There was no way to plan a more in-depth explanation until he knew who he would be faced with. He had a solid foundation and a short-term general cache; he would manage to get the message across. Why was he even worried about this? He had prepared for this moment for years, had done his research, constructed a solid foundation upon which to argue and teach.

 _Because I am afraid_ , Aramaki realized. _This is the goal of one life, and I realize it over a potential galaxy-threatening cognoweapon. What happens in the next days and weeks… will decide many things._

"Sir?" a female voice asked. He looked up. A young woman in a blue dress was standing in the center of his office, a slim tablet under one arm. "Yes, Iva?"

"Arcturus Traffic control is reporting that Special Council Flight 025 has deccelerated to STL at the flight perimeter and has logged on; they're being routed to High Security Spinward 9 now."

"Thank you, Iva. Inform me when they are stationside and on their way here please, I would like to personally greet them at the air garage entrance."

"That will be no problem with your schedule, Sir."

"Good. Once they're here, please get the team assembled in the briefing room at Cyber Analytics. I will talk to the representative, then we will have an introduction on-site, followed by the briefing."

"Yes Sir."

 **= Chapter 5 - "Welcome to Section 9" =**  
 **-| May 19th, 2232 |-**

The bridge of the _Siav'eris Blade_ was buried deep inside the hull, as part of what the salarian designers called the Central Intelligence and Control Pod, a reinforced armored capsule that held the vital command and control facilities of the frigate and was located on the second of the three main pressure hull decks of the frigate.

The bridge and CIC had been build as one singular large room; the captain's chair sat in the frontal third of the room, slightly elevated and ringed by the primary officers chairs; the four stations of the Flight control were located forward beyond this command island inside a projection bubble of near-panoramic holographic display panes and trigraphic projectors, the control chairs partially suspended without a deck underneath as to open up as many perspectives as possible for the pilot. Fed with the comprehensive sensory fusion from the frigate's computers, the holographic panes and trigraphic displays created a perfect illusion of the bridge hovering, exposed, in the midst of space, creating maximum situational awareness not only forward, but also aft.

Salarian-typical, the outside view was saturated with visual overlays, HUD elements, and trigraphic and electronic controls in a myriad colors and dense salarian Koasan script, delivering as much information readily accessible to the flight crew as possible.

For Garrus Vakarian, entering the bridge to catch a first look of their destination, the dense mess of projections and graphics was mostly confusing, though his own military suit training enabled him to cut through most of the dense information delivery to the pure visuals buried underneath.  
Space was filled with orange and green veins populated by blue-rimmed boxes, defining the traffic lanes used to corral and direct spaceborne traffic around the center of it, a conflagration of miniature graphics also helpfully highlighted by a separate trigraphic window with fewer augmented reality overlays, only framed by vector and orientation information - the oblong shape of Arcturus Station, almost looking like an exotic seed at the distance.

The pilot whistled between his lips as he fit the spacecraft smoothly into its assigned slot and brought her in, dialing down the amat-hydrogen candles and increasing the counter-mass factor to compensate: "Well, would you look at that. Arcturus Station, core of the Systems Alliance."

"Your first time here?", Garrus asked the pilot over the shoulder.

"Actually, yes. Never got the chance before now to fly this deep into Alliance space."

A new voice chimed in from hidden speakers, perfectly clear and modulated in salarian High Kant: " _SCF-025, Arcturus Approach, reduce approach velocity to 500 kps; be aware you have a supercapital transport re-routing into your trajectory in front of you; maintain minimum security clearance of 1000 kilometers off-stern_."

Ahead of them, a new connection had connected two of the orange-framed lanes, and a singular blue box was passing through it, flashing white as maneuvering engines worked against momentum to reverse the vector of the spacecraft.

"Is that an AI talking?", Garrus asked, pointing ceiling-ward.

"Could be," Turmer admitted. "No idea either way, sounds like every other human on the channel, though…" off-handily the pilot scrounged around on one of his trigraphic controls, selecting and enlarging a smaller window that had hovered over the rim of his left control board. "Look at the Digital Com window from Arcturus approach for Flight Stations. You can see that by the ID packages attached to the channels", he explained to Garrus, setting the filters: "All of those connections are data, as you can see here," a left-handed finger circled one column of the connections list, "-We're one of…. uh, eight flights that got HQDA voice com channels open. The rest is… hey, what kind of protocol is that actually?", he asked the VI, "and hold the answer a second.

"Arcturus Approach, SCF-025, reduced velocity to 500 kps, maintaining stand-off of 1000, and we see that Supercap going into our lane."

The reply came immediately without any delay: " _Solid copy SCF-025. Advise you stay solid on the controls; approach to High Security Docking Spinward 9 is heavy trafficked and maintains by Council standards very tight flight operations. Now reduce to 250 kps_."

"We'll handle it Approach, thanks for the heads-up. Reducing to 250 kps. Clear."

Garrus looked nervously into the depths of the trigraphic cockpit windows. "What does 'very tight flight operations' mean anyway?"

Turmer's eyes flickered, searching out some set of graphics in the depth of the trigraphic Heads-Up Display surrounding him.

"5 kilometers and less stand-off, with tight 'lanes and high velocity limits. No worries, Council standard means "slowest expectable reaction time" - I'm faster. And VI, is that flight management protocol indeed AI-driven?"

A general-purpose male salarian voice answered his query: "Yes. 'Interstellar Flight Standard Protocol ASAI-5412.6521' is a Systems Alliance standard Close Traffic Management protocol that involves a real-time link between the Approach AI network and the Master Altitude, Propulsion and Guidance AI of the connected spacecraft. The system handles maneuvering intentions and vector control, traffic warnings, and approach management automatically; transhuman involvement is peripheral-"

" _SCF-025, Arcturus Approach, reduce velocity to 100 kps at this time and continue decelerate to 10kps as you approach_."

Ahead of them, Arcturus Station had swiftly drawn closer, now less than 10,000 kilometers away.

"Approach, 100 kps," Turmer confirmed, slightly adjusting the orientation of the Blade. "Accident rate?"

"By all accounts, negligible to none. ASAI-5412.6521 is quad-redundant and has reaction times of under 50 microseconds in live environments."

Garrus spread his mandibles halfway: "Talk about solid tech."

Turmer nodded. "And it works. Also takes SysCon work off the controllers and the Helm officer, me-"

" _SCF-025, prepare for 'lane change from Approach Taxi 89 to Outer Rotation Taxi 12, Slot 855. Deccelerate to 500 mps as you transition and prepare for 100 mps._ "

"-Copy all approach, Outer Rotation Taxi 12, Slot 855, decelerating to 500 and preparing for 100 mps, executing now." Turmer's fingers flew over a trigraphic control window, snipping together conditions and variables for the maneuvering computer. The rim of the windows lit up blue-white as the plasma engines "spiked" in synchronicity with a heavier cee-eem field.

"We get to handle all of this by voice communication and only data links for traffic activity data, trajectories and utilities instead of fancy AI linkage. Maybe some remote intervention, but no two-party control system. Now excuse me, this is going to get tight."

" _SCF-025, now transition from Outer Rotation Taxi 12 to Inner Descend 65, Slot 044, at 500 mps. Enter Inner Rotation Taxi 24, proceed to Lateral Taxi 8 Slot 219, deccelerate to 100 mps and await handover to High Security Spinward 9 DocCon._ "

"Approach, transitioning to Inner Descend 65, Slot 044, at 500 mps."

Turmer broke his spacecraft out of the ring trajectory that circled around Arcturus and closed with the station, catching his trajectory and pulling "up" and into the inner transitioning ring. Ahead, a big holographic sign in space denoted the Lateral Taxi 8 trajectory, which ran the length of Arcturus spinward of the kilometer-long docking arms extending into space.

" _SCF-025, decelerate to 100 mps and hold at stand-by docking slot 0855, zero-zero-zero arm relative. Handing you over to High Security Docking Spinward 9 DocCon now. Arcturus Approach, clear._ "

"SCF-025, copy all, awaiting DocCon."

Turmer Kirrahe brought the frigate to a stop next to the docking arm, close enough to see the tiny stick figures of humanoids in white pressure suites and the spidery shapes of maintenance robots crawling across the spacecraft in the docks that sprouted from the arm if one looked closely. AR overlays segmented the visually indistinctive tubes of whipple shielded docks into sections, rows and columns; High Security Docking Spinward 9 was located in the relative lower third of the docking arm, closer to the station proper, and visible guarded by turrets cannons in addition to the bulbs of GARDIAN lasers and the half-spheres of barrier generators, helpfully highlight by the cockpit systems.

"They weren't kidding about the high-security aspect."

"Though I would question who wants to start trouble anywhere close to this station. There's fighters and corvettes running patrols over the place and you can bet that one command and we'd be making half light-speed as a barrier field pushes us off. No, that's a hyperbole", Turmer interjected as Garrus turned to him with a clear-as-day "You're kidding" expression, "but you get the point. This is a military station. The kind of barriers such a facility can generate will chuck someone like us away at speed; they have to, otherwise cracking open the barriers would be easy."

" _SCF-025, DocCon is taking you over. Requesting you open and slave your Dock Guidance controls on Channel 16-Alpha-4522._ "

"Copy DocCon, link is open on 16-Alpha-4522," Turmer hit the appropriate request thrown up by a VI, swiping to the right to authorize the slave, "awaiting your Link".

" _Copy SCF-025. Locked and linked._ ", orange turned to green on the trigraphic window, lines connecting as the computers of the Siav'eris Blade and the Docking Control linked up the individual sub-systems.

" _...and taking you in now._ " Smoothly the frigate went into motion, sliding along the docking pillar, thrusting to evade a departing contact, all the while rotating around its X-axis until the bulk of Arcturus Station had come to align above Turmer's and Garrus's head.

They slid relative upwards and before High Security Spinward 9, rising and rotating to the right, then decelerated again to slide into smooth, direct alignment with an open frigate docking bay, arrestor arms at the ready at both sides.

Turmer nodded, watching a big trigraphic render of the altitude control systems and the commands feed into it. "Solid approach control, masterful use of thrusters and eezonics."

" _Ready to push you in and capture, SCF-025; awaiting your GO._ "

"Copy Docking Control; SCF-025 is GO for final push-in and capture." Turmer turned around to Garrus, half-lifting himself out of his padded bucket seat: "And that would be your cue to join the rest of the team. Have a nice day." He turned back around, watching his craft edge forward into the dock.

* * *

 **A/N:** Kept you waiting, huh? Sorry about the lack of updates, it's been a busy week (and me Sevoris had a writers block atop of that.)


	18. Welcome to Section 9 Pt 2

_Two… security personnel_ , Garrus decided after a second of puzzling about their exact nature, in blocky black armor were waiting for them, blocky weapons easily held in their right hands, muzzles pointed downward and safeties on. One of them stepped forward slightly in a smooth, trained motion, his head turning to address Bau: "Council Representative Jondum Bau?"

The salarian, wearing simple utilitarian clothing over his own form fitting armor, just nodded in confirmation, though he automatically flashed his credentials on the close-range Display ID beacon.

"Very well Sirs and Madams. Pick-up is waiting for you at the Lobby; we will escort you there. This way please."

The speaker took the lead, and the group trailed behind. Garrus noted how the second guard stepped in behind them, keeping just enough distance. _Professional suspicion. Good. Wouldn't expect otherwise with a Spectre and his team._ The two guards led them to an elevator that opened on cue; the first guard stepped aside and let Bau enter; the rest of the team followed.

Then the two guards folded in, and the door closed. The elevator set into motion. Garrus' gaze dropped to the door control panel; none of the guards had even touched it, instead standing stiffly in front of the doors. His gaze blinked over their hands, arms and body posture. They were swinging and subtly shifting in a process of natural bipedal balancing, but not working their hands, craning their heads or showing other quirks. _So… androids? Robots? Bioroids? The voice sounded natural…_ The guards didn't move their heads either, he remembered now. They didn't seem to have the restrictions of normal eye positions. Designed efficiency, the sapience they seemed to display only a subset of the hierarchy whose foundation was forged by simpler control systems. _Plug-and-play awarness. In some ways, not unsimilar to the VIs controlling our mechs. ...Just a lot smarter. Probably._ Even your basic household VI had a natural language interface strong enough to beat anyone but very deep, very well versed conversations.

The elevator came to a stop, the faint hum in the background receding, then stopping. The doors opened with a small ding, disgorging them into a lobby. The area housed several columns of elevator tubes picking up and delivering transhuman personnel, the overwhelming majority wearing Alliance Armed Forces dress blues over E-suits; the sound of feet on polished polymer was everywhere, a cascading flow of clacks as solid soles hit the color-marked floor. Both of their guards stepped out and made way, the second to the right stretching out a hand in an inviting gesture that managed to convey sincere offer and command at the same time. The first guard simply stepped into the stream of people, and… they parted ways.

Garrus and the team followed behind as their escorts somehow weaved through the stream of people, changing course, sidestepping, yet people parting way for them, the group folding into what Garrus slowly realized was a synchronized "mess". Unconsciously he craned his neck, looking for the invisible director choreographing the commotion.

Obviously, there was none to be seen. The scanners that were most certainly were there would be hidden in the ceiling, walls, furniture, microscopic holographic light field cameras with enough resolution to read Iris patterns and thumb prints of people, feeding into the great military panoptica and its analytical AIs. This very second, some file somewhere was probably growing by the gigabytes per second as some alien intelligence analysed his topology and remote biometrics, trawled his file with some intelligence agency, filled his behavior and ran predictions.

Garrus suppressed an involuntary shudder. Even the best of the Citadel surveillance systems were nothing compared to what was known about transhuman systems and their all-intrusive surveillance and predictive monitoring. The idea that transhumans had such great control over themselves and their behavior as to trick and bypass these systems…

He forced his thoughts on different matters, watching the people around them as they approached the edge of the terminal and a long series of security checkpoints. Almost everyone here was at least as tall as him, standing an easy two meters tall; various transhumans towered above that, most of them ursine uplifts or the bulks of heavy-duty synthetic Shells, presenting alien heads to the world.

The front guard approached one of the security gates; its doors opened without any visible or audible cue, the lead guard and Bau simply passing through the scanner posts under the gaze of big, bulky security robots, more obviously mechanical and holding bulky weapons better placed in the hands of Final Line soldiers. Garrus threw them a passing gaze, seeing the gate close smoothly behind the second escort. At the other gates… more thorough inspections were applied, people stepping through the gates single-file. In perfect firing zones of the security robots and other hidden-away security measures if they tripped the security systems.

Then it finally clicked what else felt misplaced - there were no service announcement, no big call-outs of personnel and flight. There was at times avid talk; other people seemed to engage in talking with thin air. Out of curiosity, he lit up his inlays, called up EM vision and applied analytical systems atop of the raw inputs his PAN could receive. The world exploded in cyan, green and blue, a dense fabric of digital connections materializing out of thin air.

Outside of the terminal, an aircar was waiting at one of the quick-embarkation slots; three humanoids stood next to it.

Two of them were more security; two meters tall, lanky at first glance, sporting sleek gunmetal black weapons with silver highlights, cloth uniforms covering their bodies head to toes, tactical black with blue highlights. A white-on-blue badge was displayed on both shoulder pauldrons.

The third one was a human; young, male, with dark hair and striking blue irises, wearing a black suit and trousers whose bulk and stiffness revealed the integrated protection. His skin was a smooth light brown; no seams or obvious cybernetic components breaching the skin.

"Council Representative Jondum Bau and his team?", he asked, hands folding in a traditional salarian greeting.

"Yes. You are from _Section 9_?". The term rolled of Bau's tongue with some difficulty, the Spectre using the _globo_ term instead of relying on translator, but he managed.

The human male nodded. "My name is Daniels, I'll be your driver. If you'd follow me, it's a short flight to Headquarters." Behind him, the doors of the car had invitingly opened without a sound, revealing the two opposite rows of four seats in the back, three in the front.

Daniels stepped around and entered in the driver's side; one of the new guards stepped in on the co-drivers side; the other took a place in the back. Garrus turned around just in time to see the two other guards vanish back inside the terminal, having departed without having spoken another word.

* * *

"So… where are we headed?", Voto'Leelas asked from his seat.

"Stanford-One. Arcturus Station has six major habitat spaces: Stanford-One to -Three, O'Neil-One and O'Neil-Two, and Arcturus Core. Section 9 Headquarters are, like several other government agencies, located in the rings, both due to the proximity to Arcturus Core and because the ring exteriors serve as additional docks."

They turned a corner and dove down into a tunnel, other aircar traffic close in front and behind.

"Why Arcturus and not 'Unity'?", Aetheis T'Lairo chimed in from her seat, the Asari matron crossing her legs comfortably.

"Historical, mostly. Section 9 has been active on Arcturus since the 2120s; by the time Phase 3 was complete, the Systems Alliance had no official governmental position, so it was agreed to bring together the major agencies on Arcturus Station together with various parts of the administration. When First Contact came and the Systems Alliance government was founded for good, Arcturus Station was too filled; furthermore there were worries if a major military station and the government really belonged together - hence the construction of Unity."

They broke out of the tunnel and down an exit; then the aircar accelerated and began dropping down a long shaft, passing by air garages and more branches. Big white printed letters in transhuman scripts passed by, translation ARgraphics catching a glimpse: "Arcturus Core - Stanford Access".

Voto called up a map of the station, pinging the public service and navigation system. In his third eye, a map of the station unfolded in three-dimensional space, a semi-transparent orange render of its shape filled with brighter traffic avenues and their route from the docks to Stanford-One drawn out in violet and blue. Apparently the Stanford Tori had been constructed from day one not to rotate on classical "wheels" with a central spoke; instead a static inner core spotted massive rails at the outer end, the Stanford Tori rotating on static wheels of their own, making the space inside of them free for further installation.

As such, the aircar access corridors ran the outside of "Arcturus Core", 'above' the Stanford Tori; from there openings in the sides of the actually unmoving "sky" permitted entrance into the Stanford Torus proper, entering, falling past the lines of the pressure seals and big maglev rails that kept the Torus rotating, and into the hab proper.

The habscape outside the windows was one of glass and greenery, eerily reminiscent of the few large spaces the quarian people permitted on their ships and stations, those few atriums were conserved biosphere was permitted to exist not as part of maximum-efficiency biological farms where as much biomass was generated inside as little space as possible, but as recreation, as a remembrance that the homeworld and the lost colonies existed not only as virtuality retreats and entoptic projections hiding away bare walls and conduits, but as actual life.

Similarly, the designers of this space had married nature with architecture, and created a functional synthesis. Glass walls permitted a true view of the outside world, and recreated the illusion of a city in a valley; then the greenery extended across it, stepped parks and rooftops, vertical greenery, tiny complex water installations accented with rock instead of the white hydroponic anchoring membranes that keep the plants watered and feed.

Ahead of them, one massive building towered in the center of the ring, a flattened hexagon growing out of the Torus "ground" all the way to the ceiling, where it sprouted connectors to the sides just underneath the artificial sky. Its facade was simple and nondescript; flat and reflective of the outside world, no complex styling, no sky garden accesses, no half-floating terraces.

Compared to the buildings around it, it seemed withdrawn, enclosed.

Voto had a feeling this was very much intentional.

Their aircar decelerated on approach, steering towards the upper facade; a piece of glass smoothly retracted and parted, revealing the entrance of a sky garage just long enough to permit them passage. They passed right of a center island studded with a big four-barreled Anti-Air cannon that satt squat in the center of the sky garage entrance, facing the outside world, and hovered towards a parking spot above the polymer-concrete floor.

Most of the aircars present were civilian models from civilian manufacturers; medium to upper price range private cars, many of them two-person scooters designed for space stations like these, mixing with enclosed one-sophont airbikes and air-quads. No heavy vehicles, police or military, were visible. A few were aircars like the one they had ridden, large secure vehicles for shifting VIPs.

They exited the vehicle on cue as soon as it had settled and opened its doors; navigational lights shut down. Daniels lead them to the one other disruption in the smooth dark red ocher walls; a set of security checkpoints, this time hermetically sealed against the outside. Four glass tubes with doors, ringed by bulky machinery, seemed the only way to permit access through the seal.

"Please enter the airlocks with your hands over your heads and remain still. Section 9 HQ is a high-security zone; as such anything entering or exiting the facility is dusted of any possible mites and scanned for illegal contents. You do not need to switch off any devices. Allow me to demonstrate." On cue, all four glass tubes opened their outer doors, the round constructs sliding out of the way.

Daniels stepped inside one just to the right of a checkpoint, the door closed behind him and sealed with the barest of hisses. His hair came into motion as apparently air was blown into the cylinder, and two scanner rings came from above and below, met in the middle, returned to their origin points, made a second pass, returned home and stayed there.

The door on the other side opened up; Daniels stepped out and it resealed on that side. A second later, the door facing the air garage opened again.

After a moment of consideration, the team members stepped forward, Voto'Leelas stepping into the leftmost one, arms over his head as advised. The airlock hissed closed behind him, and the air current started. Then the scanners started their run.

His inlays spit out results from the ECM suite immediately. The scanners were thorough: Extreme-resolution SQUID-MRI scanning of the kind used in atomic mapping, X-Ray, T-Ray, ultrasound echolocation, mass effect resonance imaging, radar, extreme-resolution surface LIDAR. It was an undefeatable barrage of sensing systems, looking for every notch and cranny, every micromachine, every seam, gazing underneath the layers of his Envirosuit and into his larger body, registering every implant and augmentative prosthetic sheathed in the themselves complex layers of the combat-rated Envirosuit.

He was fine with that. The way the transhumans seemed to share earmarked info, it would probably make opening a dialogue much easier.

The scan finished, the rings returning to storage position, segmented doors sliding shut. The inner door of the airlock hissed open, and Voto stepped out, together with the rest of the other three - Bau, Vakarian and T'Lairo.

A short human was waiting for them near the elevators that waited just beyond the security checkpoint next to a set of doors and an open stairway spiraling downwards out of view. He was surprisingly short for a transhuman in general, and showing signs of visible aging. And he was standing stiffly, arms low at his sides instead of up and hands clasped together as Vakarian had seen often, spine erect.

One last cue transcended across species and topological barriers. The human male radiated authority and confidence like a bonfire, the barest hint of the power at his fingertips, as analytical eyes prodded the four alien arrivals to his domain.

"Gentlesophs, my name is Daisuke Aramaki." His voice sounded old, Garrus noted. He wondered why this particular transhuman had chosen this appearance, this… frailty? No, he wasn't frail. There was a certain… hardness in his stance and gaze that Garrus would have recognized with every sophont.

"Spectre Bau, allow me to welcome you and your team, Garrus Vakarian, Voto'Leelas vas Siav'eris Blade nar Xas'Itan, Aetheis T'Lairo," he turned and bowed slightly to every one of the four, "to Public Security Section 9."

He extended one hand towards the elevators. "This way please. We have a lot to talk about."

* * *

 **CULTURE** **/** **LANGUAGES**  
 **Globo**

Globo is a transhuman language born from increasing globalization and intermixing of the interplanetary and interstellar age. During this time, hundreds of different cultures intermixed on the colonies of Sol and beyond, creating a host of creole languages which drew from a manifold of already known languages and also began to integrate specific artificial construction.

Globo is one of the most popular outbirths of this time, a complex mixture of european and asian languages that was designed around accessability as well as a certain richness of terms. Globo introduces several words that refer to the same specific thing in order to increase general understandebility, but also diversifies its vocabulary with a selection of constructs from a variety of languages, including a host of modifying pre- and sufixes.

Globo has spawned a subset of other languages or variants; _Knojiāohuàn_ for example is a complex creole language inspired by Globo that was specificaly developed to break down any form of language barriers in articulating scientific concepts.

The amount of "native" Globo speakers among transhumanity is estimated in excess of 70% (given most transhumans casualy speak 4 or 5 languages fluidly, conventional standards of language control are hard to apply) and Globo is, together with English and Mandarin, one of the official languages of the Systems Alliance government.


	19. Welcome to Section 9 Pt 3

This time, the elevator was nice enough to say where they were heading: "Next stop: Director's Offices." The voice was young and pleasant, androgynous.

A large floor-to-ceiling screen helpfully illustrated their position inside the Section 9 headquarters. From what Garrus could see, the "building" was more part of the entire habitat than the exterior would have suggested; it even had its own docking bays.

But, the entire building was structured logically. At the top where the stationside transports; the sky garages. Underneath that followed what looked like on-site habitation; at least several levels were headed with "Living Quarters". Then came "Offices" which included the Director's Offices at the very top; below that was "General Areas". Underneath that, sinking into the foundations of the _Stanford_ Torus, was "Operations", followed by "Storage" and "Space Docks." People lived and arrived at the very top. They descended to work below. The Operations teams then descended from offices to Operations, kitted themselves out, and probably departed through the docks. When they returned, or evening came, the entire scheme unfolded in the other direction.

Suddenly light shone into the elevator cabin.

T'Lairo made an appreciating sound. "A Sky garden. Very nice."

"Oh, this is classical architecture. Widespread ever since the 2020s. But entoptics or holoscapes just don't have the same psychological effect as some true greenery."

The elevator came to near-silent stop. The view jolted slightly, but inside the elevator they felt nothing. _Solid inertics too. Whatever Public Security Section 9 is… they got money._

"So you still value nature?", T'Lairo turned to Aramaki.

"Why, only because we augment ourself, we should not? Some things are very much enjoyable as they are; no need to change them."

Aramaki led them out the door and to the right, passing two further set of elevator doors before the corridor opened up into a massive walkway that circled the sky garden. They passed another floor-to-ceiling display element, a map of the floor. Director Aramaki's office stood at the very top, and was located at the end of one of three junctions that sprouted from the sky garden atrium. Director of Public Security Section 9.

There were other sections. Intelligence. Investigation. Operations. Forensics. Cyberanalytics. Transportation and Logistics. Subsections were also listed - Surveillance. Signal Interception and Analysis. Cyberspace monitoring. Personal Analytics. Crime Scene Imaging. Event Reconstruction. Surveillance Operations. Rapid Situation Intervention. And more.

 _So both an intelligence agency, a police agency, and a paramilitary unit. Well, I suppose when you deal with "terrorism and capital Infocrime" as they say on their webpage, that's what comes out at the end._

"You're a large agency", Garrus remarked.

"Oh yes, and this is only our Headquarters", Aramaki said. "Morning, Arvi", he greeted the finnish receptionist.

"Morning Sir. Sorry to be late-" Aramaki cut him off with a wave of the hand. "It's all good, we talked about this. How's Juhani?"

"One happy bundle of a baby." Arvi smiled behind his desk, turning to greet the Spectre team that had taken some awkward distance. "Welcome to Section 9, gentlesophs. Enjoy your stay."

Aramaki led the way back down the corridor. Garrus and Aetheis exchanged glances. _Staged?_ , the Asari Matrons gaze asked. Garrus twitched his shoulders minutely, tilting his head as he did. _No idea._

 _Let's get the conversation rolling again before it gets awkward._

"Only?", Garrus asked Aramaki as they walked down the corridor in between plant pods and big holoscape artworks mounted to wood-paneled walls.

"Yes. We have four major facilities in the Sol system alone, two others in Arcturus, and all told we have 35 major facilities just like this one; save for some administrative staff we centralized here on Arcturus instead of using NetLinks to bring everything together."

"That sounds like a lot", T'lairo commented, taking a moment to appreciate a small cherry tree in full bloom that occupied a half-round bulge in the corridor.

"Well, _asiyoata_ T'Lairo, we are responsible for over 100 billion sophonts, in the real world and in the noosphere. Just as organisations like C-Sec, it's impossible to centralize everything. We have to spread out, and we need a certain amount of sophont personnel. Here we are."

Akamai's office door was towering like the rest of the architecture; the human seemed almost volus-like in front of it.

Bau took in the room with quick, economic flicks of his eyes, flipping his cognitive acceleration to 2x. The office was large and had a rounded base form molded with organic bulges to create space not only for a large, solid table with chairs in front of it, but also a medium-sized conference table and an integrated bar.

A sizable window allowed a look of the outside world, going from floor over onto the angled ceiling, looking out over the artificial habscape outside of the Section 9 building. Impossible window configuration considering room position and building construction. Holoscape.

The table was adorned by various items: a classical human pen holder, paper holders, a charge station for a medium-sized tablet. The remaining items were the minute control elements of haptic trigraphics; a collapsed destop pc interface, a com unit, digital paperwork strewn about as photorealistic renders.

Behind the desk and single big leather chair lay a large holographic display, molded to follow the curve of the wall, flanked by flag holders. The Systems Alliance Flag. The flag of the human country of Japan, the red-shadered planets and stars circling around the single red dot in the center on white background. The duty flags of the SAAF and the Alliance Army. And two flags, closest to the center, showing a rendition of human space in classical silicon circuitry boards, centered on an all-seeing eye on a shield. Words bent around the golden rim of the sigil: "Ministry of the Interior - Public Security Section 9. _Semper Vigilis Animus_."

Then he noticed the smaller hang-outs at the wall; personal items almost hidden away in the voluminous room. Two of them were hand-printed certificates from the University of New Kyōto, degrees in psychology and economy; one was from a military academy, with the Systems Alliance Sigil at the top. Then there were the military awards. Most of them were bronze or silver, styled like classical stars, but then…

Bau did a double take, pinged his ARO to confirm the analysis.

A golden Relay, a sword between the prongs, surrounded by five worlds, overlaid with the shapes of human starships and fighters, three on each side, set on red satin instead of blue.

This was a combat award of the highest order. A medal handed out to distinguished, senior veterans of the Relay 314 conflict - The "Relay of Xin Shanxi".

 _So I was right. He is the Aramaki, of the Tohnoda School Triumvirate. Architect of a dozen decapacitation strikes, mastermind of the deaths of Javeris Kontis and Desolas Arterius._

 _And he is leading an organisation trusted with fighting cybercrime and comes to the Council with a grave threat to galactic security._ But _he's also been recorded in public to support greater cooperation with the Council._ And _he showed no revulsion at all for Vakarian._

This just got a lot more

complicated _. Let's see where this goes._

Four chairs had already been arranged in front of Aramaki's table, in the same style as the rest of the furniture; dark wooden bases with bright, swung beams, and small gunmetal black highlights. Dark leather padding. They were custom-molded for each species, clearly designed to invoke the culture and physique of the various alien delegates.  
It also subtly served to control the seating arrangement; Bau would sit in front of Aramaki, and the seat for his Second-in-Command, T'Lairo, was right next to him.

So they do know something. Bau's gaze flickered to somewhere, no doubt that an image fusion surveillance system was recording them, and murmured under his breath: "Well played, AIS. Well played."

"Excuse me?", Aramaki asked. His topology was smooth and controlled, but there was the barest, implant-registered flicker of a smile of his own. _It's the game. And I know you have social profiling augs. And you know I do._

Bau took his seat in front of Aramaki deliberately slow, timing his descend so they both took a seat at the same time, a move Aramaki accepted. _But you do respect that I am a Spectre._

"Before we begin, can I get any of your Gentlesophs something to drink?" Aramaki's hand half-hovered over a trigraphic pop-up.

"No thank you", Bau declined. The rest of the team similarly shook their heads.

"Very well."Aramaki folded his hands on the table, sitting upright and fixing Bau in his center of vision. The Spectre lent back slightly and organized his thoughts.

"So, Director Aramaki… how grave of a threat is NOVUM SPIRITUS? And why did _your_ agency specifically request Council support? Ambassador Goyle was only ready to disclose rough details and once again bring forward a request for Council space jurisdiction."

"Off course Anita was discrete." Aramaki was silent for a single second.

"Spectre Bau, I assume you are aware of the current security debacle our people face? I would even hazard that you specifically have had direct involvement with more than one of the cases we are referencing here?"

"Yes. But then, allow me to ask a question… why?"

 _Why do you care?_

"Because, Spectre Bau, I believe in unity, peace and prosperity. I have seen first-hand when a civilization does not work towards it, what gets… lost.

"Every Sophont has a right to a happy life, without fear of death, ruin, or loss of self. I think we can all agree on this statement.

"And as we are all aware here, in the past years… we have failed achieving this. We have permitted the flow of technology, people and knowledge that dealt a great deal of harm. Perpetrators we sought escaped our justice. Crimes that were preventable happened where those who could do something about them were not present. And for me, that is unacceptable.

"Some of you may have problems with our definitions of sophonthood", Aramaki's querying gaze fell upon Voto'Leelas, "but all of our cultures agree that every sophont, everyone is equal and has the same rights. The Citadel civilizations hold sophonts just like the Alliance does. And I believe in the Alliance and what it represents, since day one. I believe the rights we extend to everyone, and the security that comes with those rights, is someone every sophont should enjoy.

"In short - I want to fix this problem. And now, what could be developed steadily… cannot be anymore. NOVUM SPIRITUS is so grave of a threat that I need a way to get my people and their experience where it is needed. So that we can intervene and protect, and so we can teach a new generation to step into our shoes in Citadel Space."

Silence reigned. Then Garrus opened his mound, voice curious: "Why do you believe that? You're Daisuke Aramaki. _The_ Aramaki. Why? Why do you care about us?" He pointed at himself.

"Mr. Vakarian, that I shot at soldiers of your polity for two months has not changed what I believed at heart far before then. You are aware I am Japanese; I suspect you are aware how patriotic Japanese citizens tended and still tend to be.

"I joined the Systems Alliance as soon as I could. _Not_ the JSDF."

Aramaki turned back around to Bau. "I can understand Anita Goyle could only disclose a few details. NOVUM SPIRITUS is extremely sensitive, and we wanted to avoid premature leaks… From any side."

"What can be so dangerous about NOVUM SPIRITUS?", T'Lairo asked. "I understand you are concerned about Ghosthacks, and so are we, but between the technology front and DNI proliferation of sufficient degree, the threat would be minimal."

"And that's the problem, _asiyoata_ T'Lairo. NOVUM SPIRITUS… has broken our tech development predictions. By generations."

Aramaki paused for a second.

"I know this sounds ludicrous, but NOVUM SPRITIUS was classified by Section 9 cyberanalytics as a 10th-generation Ghosthack Infoweapon as of yesterday evening."

Silence.

Voto'Leelas began, slowly:"...Isn't that a solid two generation beyond any Ghosthack weapon developed in human space?"

Aramaki nodded. "It is. My Chief of Cyberanalytics has a more detailed briefing for you, but NOVUM SPIRITUS has two significant breakthroughs.

"One. NOVUM SPIRITUS is generally compatible with humans…. And turians." Garrus shifted in his chair.

"Second… NOVUM SPIRITUS does not require a DNI to subvert a person."

" _What?_ "

"NOVUM SPIRITUS does not require a DNI to subvert a person. That is the main breakthrough. It's a Ghosthack weapon that delivers its payload via a Basilisk hack as well. The first of its kind."

Silence reigned as the Spectre and his companions digested the information that had just been disclosed.

"This… isn't good," T'Lairo finaly managed.

 _That's an understatement,_ Garrus thought. _This... this could cause wars._

"No. Belief me, I would have prefered any other situation to this. Moreso because we have reason to belief NOVUM SPIRITUS will be delivered to Citadel Space within this week."

"...No wonder you requested Citadel assistance like this." Garrus made a faint off-hand gesture, refering to the emergency meeting that had taken place a day ago.

"And I got it in possible the best way - a Spectre and his field team," Aramaki remarked with a genuent smile. "My Chief of Cyberanalytics, Bosoun, has prepared a more detailed briefing on NOVUM SPIRITUS, together with another briefing from the team leader who secured the weapon and another one for the background and other conclusions. We'll be assembling at Cyberanalytics.

"Do any of you have any more questions?"

Bau looked into the round: "Not right now."

"Good. Then let's go."

* * *

At a first glance, most people would have mistaken Bosoun for an exotic Shell, some brilliant hacker's slightly fetishistic choice of body shape. In some manner, they would have a point. But Bosoun had never had a human Shell to begin with, even if he was humanoid. Nor was he _homo sapiens augmentum,_ or _homo sapiens anoteros_.

 _Pan sapiens artificie anoteros_ had been born out of African Union research in the 2130s; one of manifold of uplift efforts that had sprawled out of Stephen Yu's breakthrough in genetically engineered neuroplasticity in non-homo sapiens species. _Pan sapiens_ had been created mostly to give transhumanity a new, growing companion, an ulterior gift of intelligence.

 _Pan sapiens artificie anoteros_ however, had been created with more specific goals. The 2130s had been the great age of alternate neural architectures. With cognitive augmentation still caught in the mire of the Kashevis Problem and no quick alternative in reach, neurocognitive science had turned to non-human minds with renewed interest.

Chimpanzee had some capabilities that far surpassed what even the best of the augmented of the 2120s could not quite channel, or at least not without losing their Ghost steadily to the augmentations. It had already been proven it was possible to engineer Chimpanzee with increasing intelligence and humanness; the early experiments had arguably been coarse attempts that produced beings that fitted into neither society or stumbled over the threshold into savantism. On their own way they had opened keys to more efficient neural architectures for mapping space or solving complex pattern issues, but it had not created the truly desired result.

PSAA opened the doors to a new castle of capabilities. The new ape uplifts were not only finally human society compatible and not overtly socially awkward (beyond remaining issues science was also unwilling to remove, if the difficult engineering would have even succeeded) but also had a whole host of new capabilities and areas where indeed they beat normal humans and even AGI to the punch.

Hacking and Cyberwarfare had been one of them.

"Morning, Bosoun", Togusa greeted back and shook his right upper hand, getting a good grip around the long, dextrous fingers and large palm, feeling the slight seams in the skin where it could split into smaller sub-manipulators for faster typing.

Bosoun's eyes were slightly worn out, the somatometric residue of a long work. "You've been sitting on this the entire night?", Togusa asked.

Bosoun nodded, turning slightly to his third arm could retrieve a big thermo-straw cub, a colorful E-skin label of " **OptiDrink** Long Work" wrapped around the side. Custom-mixed, OptiDrinks were a common stand-by of military origin for personal use, tailored to drinker and situation. In this case, the base mixture was heavy with sugar, proteins, caffeine and a set of customized trigger agents for neuroregenerative properties that had been engineered into Bosoun's brain from inception.

"Yeah. Trying to run shifts, but we need every single sophont we have on ripping NOVUS SPIRITUS apart codeline by codeline. All 20 million of them. And we're still reverse-engineering how it works, which only gets harder because we have zero idea about the payload package. Best we have are some outlines…" Bosoun stopped for a moment to crop his head hair with a hand.

"This is one of these 'one-in-a-year' cases. At least our Infomorph staff doesn't quite tire out like wetware does."

Bosoun took another deep slurp from his drink, then put it back onto his glass table and kicked himself off with the use of one hand and one dextrous foot.

Togusa dropped into a chair of his own and kicked himself over to Batou and the Major, who had taken their own seats on the other side of the room. He scooted through the central open workspace filled with some minute trigraphics for a presentation interface, and let the chair stop himself next to Batou. "So. What's going on?", he asked.

The smoked glass doors to the combined work/briefing room slid open and spit another human into the congregation, Kim Baumann from Investigations. His beard was surprisingly unkempt, quickly and efficiently cut instead of the elaborate job he normally presented to the world. He did look rested, however, and dropped into the chair that wheeled over to him rather differently to the exhausted slump of the others.

Batou leaned over to Togusa, arms crossed over the backrest of his chair: "Word has it we have visitors from the Council."

"Like… dignitaries?"

"No idea. Could be about a dozen different organizations. C-SEC alone has something like three departments that could be on our case, including Special Investigation and Response."

"Iva, what do you know?". Togusa turned to a spot of thin air. Thin blue lines burst out of thin air, curving and stretching as the ARvatar of Section 9s Personal Assistant AI materialized in the augmentality.

"Nothing for you, I am afraid." She fell silent.

Ishikawa chimed in from a group of Saito, Paz and Borma that had congregated around him and a work station where he had been elaborating to them about something: "The Old Ape has slammed one heck of an InfoSec on whatever is going on. He's got a meeting in his office, but that's about as much as anyone can see; it's completely classified and redacted. Info blackout everywhere. No security logs, no visitor logs, no spimes." He turned back to his screen, resuming his talk: "So, anyway, as you can see here…"

Togusa turned to Batou: "Listen Batou, uh-"

"Yeah?" Batou threw a quick glance at the Major, which drifted aside on her own chair.

"...Could I talk about something with you after this? In your office?"

"What about?" Batou swiveled to face him, then saw Togusa's facial expression. He gave his best expression of a discrete knowing look: "Yeah sure, we can. My door is always open for you, you know that."

There was a moment of silence. "Thanks Batou. Like, for everything."

"You're welcome, Togusa." Batou patted him on the back, hard, a smile on his face.

The door to Analytics 04 parted for Aramaki, in his classic suit and upright gait, arms by his sides, striding into the room.

Then a green-grey skinned salarian stepped into the room behind him, a towering muscled Asari besides him, and conversation between the transhuman team members died.

Aramaki stepped aside and allowed all four alien sophonts to form a small row at the entrance of the room. "Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may introduce: Spectre Jondum Bau and his team. XO Aetheis T'Lairo, Infospecialist Voto'Leelas vas Siav'eris Blade nar Xas'Itan, and Operator Garrus Vakarian."

Everyone in the room exchanged glances, surprise and shock written onto their faces; Ishikawa, Borma and Saito all looked straight at Paz, who mouthed a silent "Not. A. Word." before taking a deep breath of his own cigar. Batou shifted his his chair, crossing his arms over the backrest and resetting his feet.

"Gentlesophs," Aramaki began as he stepped aside and towards Major Kusanagi, extending an indicating left hand and signaling her to stand up, "Major Motoko Kusanagi, CO of Mission Team Alpha-01." The team members all lifted their hands in sign and greeting, Raven pushing off to join the rest of the team as the group around Ishikawa came forward to join Batou and Togusa behind the Major. "She's also leading one of our most effective clusters, Iris."

Kusanagi offered a hand with the palm turned upwards, and Bau took it, respectfully turning his hand in tune with hers so his palm was turned upwards by the end, then turned the salarian greeting into a human hand shake. "A pleasure, Miss Kusanagi."

"Likewise." In the background, DisplayID beacons linked and pulled the public records of each other; at the same time, the two were seizing each other up, eyes flicking from detail to detail as implants devoured every piece of available intelligence. The style of movement. The inertia of limbs, created through the mass of cybernetic systems. The smoothness of skin, the intricate mathematical patterns that revealed the synthetic nature of the outer hulls; the particular biomechanics hinting at implants and augmentative prosthetics. The controlled, scrubbed body language, the circled precision of trained military personnel.

Two ex-military cyborgs recognized each other in that moment, DisplayID unfolding entoptic lists of known accomplishments, and the subtle game of superiority began, an augmented topological war of cues of superiority and inferiority that began and ended in the second it took to complete the greeting rituals.

Around them, others were introducing themselves one after another.

Togusa considered for a second, then approached the turian in blue armor that stood slightly aside. "Christian Togusa. Lead Investigations Specialist on Alpha-01." He presented the human imitation of a turian fist of greeting, hand balled with index and pinky finger slightly uncurled held over the sternum, and a slight bow of the head, eyes closed.

"Garrus Vakarian. Technically, uh, I'm a contract operator with Spectre Bau; mid-to long-range combat, recon, sniping, and investigations as well."

"C-Sec?", Togusa asked. "Also, allow me to introduce Batou." He stepped aside a bit to let the big cyborg greet Garrus.

"Batou?", Garrus asked.

"Technically it's Steve Connors. But everyone just calls me Batou. Was born Baton Rouge, UISA Sol."

Garrus looked at the Leupold eye prosthetics. "Rangers?"

"Yes. You met them?"

"Cross exercise with 1866th Reconnaissance of the 122nd Legion; we had snipers from the… 456th Rangers," Garrus elaborated. "Everyone had the same eye augmentations. Stood out really and I did some research in the meantime. Is that still the 2221 release?"

"...Uh, no, actually it's the 2230 release. The physical specs just haven't changed. So you're into sharpshooting?" Garrus nodded thrice in confirmation.

Batou turned around: "Hey Saito, got another sniper for you."

Saito quietly separated himself from the furball that had formed around Voto'Leelas and Ishikawa as the two lapsed into some technical smalltalk of their own ("I always wanted an informed opinion on VI networking" Ishikawa could be overheard), excusing himself from Aetheis T'Lairo with a few quick words in High Thessian: "Excuse me, _ashathir'sethisa_." The asari looked dumbfounded for a moment.

Saito gave Garrus almost the same greeting, safe for one detail; he hold his fist not over the sternum, but his heart, and exposed the fingers slightly more: " _Sermas okar keshfraver osav_."

Garrus returned the greeting: " _Sermas okar keshfraver sekura oves_."

There was a moment for silence.

"Where did you serve with turians that they declared you _keshfraver osavi_?"

"Merc outfits. The Major pulled me after an Op in the Verge, some… 6 years ago. Got me a job with JSOC and the 501st, then I switched to Section 9 together with her. I owe the lady my life. Good chance my stack would rot on some god-forgotten planet otherwise."

"So… StarPol, Ex-Ranger, Ex-Merc turned Soldier… you're a colorful collection."

"Your team isn't?", Saito asked with a raised eyebrow.

"And it's a colorful team because it is diverse. Motoko Kusanagi." She stretched out a hand for Garrus to shake. " _Overspecialize and you breed in weakness_. Our diversity introduces a set of unique viewpoints and synergistic skillsets," she elaborated in a friendly tone that somehow managed to sound as if she was representing this viewpoint for the first time. "Togusa here has not only experience with the inner workings of interstellar crime investigation, but also interstellar logistics and smuggling, with an aside note in aerospacecraft identification. Batou is not only one of our field combat specialists, but also our general weapons and tactics expert. Saito has not only sniper and operator skills, but is also very well versed in alien culture, merc outfits, biotic and conventional tactics, and the nature of the edges of Council space and the Terminus beyond. I can go on.

"The finer point of the matter is that we all support each other, and each of us has an individual outlook. Your own team", she said, referring to the Spectre group, "mirrors this philosophy."

"And I guess that's why you have an… uplifted ape?", Garrus hazarded, "as your Chief of Cyberanalytics?"

"Chimpanzee. And yes, among other things. He's also a natural prodigy in all forms of Infosystems. Has decades of natural experience and associated synergistic skills. And speaking of which, I think the briefing's about to start. Have a seat." Garrus turned around when he sensed something moving up behind him. It was another chair molded for a turian, just of the right size and height to hold his frame in a comfortable, relaxed position that would keep him attentive.

He carefully settled, noting how Togusa rolled up in his own chair besides him. Aetheis T'Lairo took a seat on his other side, a loose semi-circle slowly forming around the central briefing space now indicated by a three-dimensional grid of violet-blue voxels.

Togusa and Aetheis greeted each other somewhat awkwardly over Garrus's lap; first shaking hands, then only touching fingers and holding the hand flat, as if pressed against a surface, before the right chest in a more asari-like greeting. Aetheis' eyes widened slightly. "No prosthetics?", she asked. Togusa was surprised: "How did you know?"

"I felt it." She indicated her hand. "No... composite under the skin."

 _Different density; different mass - something a biotic might feel. Perhaps even something with my nerves, given she's asari. Makes sense_ , Togusa thought.

Bosoun rolled into the center space, cracking all pairs of hands and feet, then commanded his chair to stop. "Right then." He turned to the ceiling: "Secure the room, please."

Around them, the glass walls turned completely intransparent; several locking mechanisms gave audible beeps, and the trigraphic locks over the doors turned red.

Text appeared in the center of the trigraphic presentation space, hovering some two meters above the floor.

[ 1021 Hours 30 Seconds Arcturus Time | May 19th 2232 ]  
[ General Briefing Irregular Infowarfare System #9854112 NOVUM SPIRITUS ]  
[ Section 9 Mission Team Alpha-01 | "Iris" Work Cluster | Council Spectre Bau ]  
[ High-Security Working/Briefing Room Cyberanalytics-04 ]

 **[** **SECURING CONFERENCE ROOM** **]**

With a "ping" the AROs of every room occupant, the Scramblers and Anti-espionage systems integrated into the wall and ceiling cut in; noise suppression systems activated to cut off audio transmission, and at the perimeter nanodefense swarms began a reinvigorated hunt for any possible sniffers.

"Right then," Bosoun began. "Welcome to the general briefing about Irregular Infowarfare System #9854112, Codename NOVUM SPIRITUS.

"A bit about myself up front." Behind Bosoun, a new trigraphic slide slid into place, a portrait and some general datapoints. "My name is Bosoun, full name Bosoun-0455, I am 46 years old, and I am an uplifted Chimpanzee with additional biomodification," he wiggled his two extra arms resting below his two natural ones, "and one of Section 9s residential Cyberanalytical experts. Served almost 3 decades in the SAAF before transferring here. So yeah, that's about it."

He switched to the next slide.

"Before I begin, how much do you", he turned to the Spectre team that sat somewhat in the middle of the half-circle of chairs, "know about Ghosthacks in general and the technical specifics?"

Bau spoke first: "I've worked several cases of Ghosthacking and Infoweapons targeted at implants as part of my Spectre duties since 2219 A.D., so I'm pretty much up-to-date on the recent developments and know the technicalities and terms."

"Good. The rest of you?" Voto'Leelas spoke next: "Pretty much the same, though I'm limping on the neuroscience. Most of my speciality are physical augments and general network security - so better elaborate if you could."

"With me and Garrus… better explain. I know the rough outlines, but no specifics", Aetheis said after a second of consideration. Garrus just nodded.

"Right then. Allow me to introduce NOVUM SPIRITUS."

* * *

 **A/N:** And we kept you waiting again. Sorry.

Unfortenately, I have some bad news with this update. This story will enter an definite three-week hiatus from next week onward, possible as long as four weeks, as Sevoris is heading into the holidays and off the 'net.

* * *

 _  
asiyoat_ : Asari honorific


	20. Welcome to Section 9 Pt 4

**A/N(Nick):** Yo?

* * *

For the next 20 minutes, Bosoun talked with the assistance of the massive trigraphic projector behind him, dissecting a 3D software chart piece by piece. Payload Shell. Compiling. Neuro-Data. Delivery Rendering. The required processing power and resulting footprint of the Vector executing on a digital system, which was depressingly low.

NOVUM SPIRITUS had a depressingly minor processing footprint, so effectively was its code packed. Among the mass of modern applications that ran on a personal processing environment, it would vanish as a graphical system application such as a Combined System Workspace commonly used by any sophont to dynamically mesh dozens of different programs into one single work suite.

Indeed that was what its code was designed to resemble on a certain level, for the computing requirements were even superficially identical: a master software that loaded a payload package (which could even be distributed) based on a simple config file it had been keyed to, then rendered these functionalities and delivered them through the audio and graphic channels of the OS it was working on.

"This payload package doesn't have a lot of teeth, does it?", Bau remarked. "I see no aggressive functionalities for subversion of the target systems of bypassing firewalls."

Bosoun stopped and shook his head, zooming back out to the general overview of the process chart.

"No, it hasn't. That's not its purpose. This here…" one hand and one foot drew a circle around the trigraph like they were the beginnings of invisible markers, "this is just the delivery software. Insertion on the target system, hiding it there, malware bypassing and defense, even the payload itself… that's all handled by other modules."

"So the NOVUM SPIRITUS we have here…"

"Was, uh, well actually _is_ , only part of the puzzle" Bosoun corrected himself with a nod to Bau. Around the central graph, more semi-transparent colored boxes showing hypothetical modules.

"Jumping a bit further and bypassing the rest of Payload Rendering and the small delivery module", the graphic zoomed in, "as you can see here, there's actually an API for what we call a 'Controller' at this time. The functions in here would allow an external program to manage several program functions for an optimal delivery of the payload, among other things managing the execution of NOVUM SPIRITUS processes."

"The more I am thinking about this, the more this looks like a… a toolkit for building these new Ghosthacks", Aetheis remarked.

Li Walkers, one of the other cyberanalysts, cut in from the side: "And that is probably what this is. We're still working on picking apart the documentation and development notes attached to this software, but yes, this…" she made a gesture into thin air that didn't result in a trigraphic or entoptic object manifesting, "this very likely a modular toolkit."

"How come you didn't recover all?", Garrus asked.

"One of the banks we pulled from their set-up during the Assault Action was rigged with thermite paste. We lost an estimated 60% of documentation they had with that accident, and forensic reconstruction of those data crystals is still ongoing. Expect we have more on that in about..." her gaze drifted into the distance for a second, "16 hours."

"Fair enough." Bau turned to Voto'Leelas: "Your questions?"

The quarian thought for a second.

"What is the payload limitation?"

Bosoun threw his hands up in the air: "Leading with the hard question, all right. It's a fair one, but… we can't really say."

The uplift turned around and gazed into the depth of the projection.

"What we'd really need is either documentation and an actual payload format to examine; reverse-engineering will only get us so far, or… uh, well, _we_ could indeed experiment with somehow reverse-engineering a payload and finding out how to deliver a payload ourselves, but that would require some things. First and foremost it would take resources and time."

"How long?"

"Once we finished combing everything and got our raw datasets, we'd need to reverse-engineer what kind of files are loaded and derive more from the rendering and output formats, then plug it all into a simulspace and brute-force our way through the rest... So say… 6 days, for a full assessment. From today."

Voto'Leelas nodded.

"What are the high-end capabilities you'd say?"

"They could be all over the spectrum. It could be early 1st and 2nd generation hacking, pressing macro-neural buttons and using what are essentially evolved social engineering techniques. Hypnosis on steroids and drugs, so to speak. Or it could go all the way up to 8th generation Ghost Insertion or maybe even beyond. Maybe NOVUM SPIRITUS can implant an entire subconsciousness agent, a Spectre of sorts, into the mind of its target, without even touching the Ghost. We just can't say. But personally? I'd bet towards the later. We're very likely talking advanced subliminal programming at the least, and more."

"So beyond the 6th and 7th generation Ghosthacking weapons we see at the bleeding edge of Citadel Infocrime right now?", Aetheis asked.

"Yes."

"...Where would one get the knowledge to develop such a weapon?". The Asari spun her chair around, thinking. "This is an… anomaly to say the least."

"Breakthroughs _do_ happen," Bosoun pointed out. "We can't exclude that archeotech was involved; various exploits of later-generation Ghosthacking weapons for transhumans were derived from Prothean neuroscience research from the Green Archives that were either used in military applications, got leaked, or otherwise acquired in the field. We could be looking at a similar situation here."

"But that would mean some spirited-away breakthrough…", The Asari began, _and that is impossible to hide from Citadel authorities_

"...or old archived data someone found a use for", Saito interrupted her, a hand held up. "Neuroscience has led in front of tech for generations on the side of the Citadel; that was in part why early adaptations of transhuman augmentations were possible so quickly, and they're only running into issues now." _Besides the unwillingness to adopt those developments, that is,_ he attached silently.

"Both of these however, necessitates resources. Resources this… OFCF should not have," Garrus concluded. "So where did they get them? What kind of actor could provide them with resources, and why?"

"Other terrorist groups", Batou said. "They're fragmented, but given that something happened in the last months, and we know there were contacts in the Verge… maybe they've begun coordinating again."

"State actors. Intelligence groups", Paz contributed. "Batarian or maybe Salarian."

"Or transhuman." Bau pointed at the obvious elephant in the room. "Your people _are_ leading in this kind of cognitive warfare."

"Or transhuman", Paz admitted. "Though I'd doubt it would be in anyone's interest to hand a terrorist group such a weapon."

He didn't start a discussion with Bau over this. Like so many weapons technologies deemed abhorrent and dangerous before, from the atomic bomb over the modern fusion drive to relativistic mass drivers, antimatter weapons, self-replicating war robots and intelligent cyberweaponry, transhumanity had been, and almost certainly was researching at this very moment Ghosthacks and other cognoweaponry to use against the Turians - and other species. There was no real point denying the possibility.

"If it serves your interests…" Bau just said calmly.

Paz nodded, a painful grimace on his face.

The silence in the room was thick enough to absorb gamma radiation. More than a few had crossed their arms during the exchange, and an invisible divide had drawn itself through the group. Togusa was working hands through his hair, Saito was scratching his stubbly beard; Paz had drawn a cigarette and was smoking it with rapid draws, looking at the ceiling as he juggled the burning topaco between the fingers of his hand.

"Well crap", Batou muttered. "How the hell are we going to work together over this?"

Aramaki answered him by stepping in from his position at the corner of the room. "I will be straightforward. The political damage that could be done if we are connected to this directly is secondary to the massive, gigantic shitstorm that would be created if NOVUM SPIRITUS strikes. That is my position, and it _will_ find support. So, ladies and gentlemen, our priority is first off all stopping NOVUM SPIRITUS. Then we worry about the rest of the fallout, or rather, it is mine and Spectre Bau's responsibility to contain the political fallout of this. Do your job, and let your leaders do theirs."

"He is right", Bau joined in. "There is _nothing_ to be gained for galactic stability by complicating the political climate with overt political sharpshooting unless we cannot avoid it; the Council's latest position was still cooperation, not aggressive isolation and containment, and Wheels shall turn back if I allow all the progress we have made over the last decade to regress because of this incident."

The tension in the air released, slowly. Topologies opened back up, and postures relaxed.

"Okay, so where do we start?", Garrus re-opened the discussion. "We know they got away with one copy of NOVUM SPIRITUS aboard the SCAS _Oliver_ , their Q-Ship. I suspect that's out best lead, and priority anyway because it has the only copy of the cognoweapon we know about. How do we track her?"

Togusa stepped into the center of the space. "I guess that is my cue. As you may be aware, there're two ways of tracking starships. Our primary avenue will be System Surveillance and System Control records of starship transits, IDs, Flight Plans and signature profiles.

"What is less well known is that the Office of Space Intelligence maintains a separate network. Unfortunately the network dumps in intervals of several hours, not real-time, so we only have the _Oliver_ 's trail. We have a partial trace that points she has begun traveling down the coreward avenues towards either the Citadel corridor or Turian space; she is not heading for Verge space, as we first suspected."

Behind Togusa, a trigraphic map of human space and the surrounding border regions unfolded in the central projection space, stars rendered photorealistically if at wrong scale, connected by the green lines of FTL routes and the blue and orange of secondary and primary relay connections. A red diamond representing the SCAS Oliver appeared in the Ohio System and made it's way spinward, smoothly "snapping" from system to system, whose orbital maps appeared and then zoomed into the background for the next map as the diamond traveled; the remainder of the space was taken up by a rapidly growing collection of radar, lidar, and thermal image pictures apparently taken by various sensors or post-processed into the image collection.

The diamond turned grey after 10 jumps, a third around the curve of the Core. "We lost her once she entered the New Dakar system, little second-class nexus for FTL traffic off the rim of the African Arm. Since then, we have not re-acquired the Oliver's unique signature, and her Q-frame is a standard sight in transhuman space, so we won't have much luck filtering them out until they make another blunder or we had the time to sift through more data."

"Likely destinations?", Garrus asked.

"There's a selection. The Indian bulk contains a lot of systems, including New Calcuta, that could be their destination. Bekenstein, in the Boltzmann system, would also be a probable destination. From there it isn't far into either Core Citadel Space and the Citadel Rings, or coreward turian space.

"Or they could head to Xin Jincheng and enter turian space from there, over the Howling Wastes. The area is a barely settled even now, and from there they could travel anywhere in turian space or beyond."

"So… how do we narrow it down?", Voto'Leelas asked.

"We don't. That's the job of our AIs. They're already crunching the numbers. The alternative is the captured Egos we have in interrogation right now."

"How many… Egos did you capture?", Aetheis asked, disgust edging into her voice.

"Over 60 in stack", the Major replied. "We have them in simulspace and are currently association-interrogating them."

"How does that work? Do you… torture them, or decompile them?"

"No need", Borma replied. "We just ask them. You can't stop automatic association when asked a question; their own brain activity tells us where to look for the information. The rest is just extraction and rendering of the associated memories. The only case where we have to do actually psychosurgery is when they have memory locks or other such modifications designed to trick exactly this.

"But there's no need for decompiling or psychosurgical interrogation. These assholes and their self-righteous ideological crap aren't worth it, and they're headed for trial and Ghost editing after this anyway," he concluded.

"...I see." Aetheis T'Lairo was clearly in thought.

"Thanks you", she added after a moment.

Borma just nodded.

"Anything else?", Bau asked.

"We still had a briefing on OPERATION DRAGONS LAIR, plus some intel on the OFCF on schedule", Bosoun remarked. "But that Intel is also on the 'Net, and EYESIGHT can brief on that anytime you want. So your call."

"Let's hear it", Bau decided. "After that, we can fan out and make ourselves familiar with each other more."

"Alright then", Bosoun turned around. "Let's start with the Operations briefing. Batou, Saito, Major, if you would?"

The three stood up and took their position in the center or the room.

The Major took the lead: "On the 16th of May 2232, Section 9 recovered actuable intel an OFCF cell operating on Cedatis Station in the outer New Ohio system had developed a new infoweapon. In result of this intelligence, Mission Teams Alpha-01, Alpha-02 and Strike Formation Omega-9 were mobilized aboard Mission Flotilla-06 "Ravenstrike" for Cedatis Station at…"

* * *

An hour later, the briefing and another long sessions of questions and answers finished, and the group began to splinter and drift apart, heading out for various tasks. Ishikawa and Voto'Leelas headed into Analytics together with Bosoun and his analysts to see what the latest progress from the analytical AIs on the server farms was; Togusa, Batou, Borma and Garrus were heading for the work area of Alpha-01; Saito, Paz and Aetheis headed out for Holding and Interrogation. Bau remained behind, saying he would return to the Siav'eris Blade and arrange the transfer of equipment and gear to Section 9.

Once almost everyone had filed out, Bau steered towards Aramaki and joined him as they stepped back out into the atrium and began to walk back towards the Concourse and the elevators. For a moment, they just walked in silence. Then Bau made a Mindcom Link request and sent it to Aramaki.

The director accepted it immediately. Bau went straight to the point.

[Director Aramaki, I am very thankful for your words during the briefing, but I have to ask: how high is the chance that your government or one of your intelligence services is involved in this? And can I trust you to investigate this and keep me apprised?]

The glass doors of Cyberanalytics smoothly slid aside, expelling them into the larger concourse and the massive trigraphic render of the transhuman extranet that dominated the mid-air space of the floor. Colored motes and streams of light representing network activity flitted along the lines of the spider web. Smaller models of star systems circled the render at an 30° angle; Sol and Arcturus opposing each other, the former a pure weave of network activity that extended from Venus to Saturn and beyond.

[You can, Bau. I am as displeased by this development as you are, indeed more likely much more so.]

Aramaki actually stopped to look at the render for a moment. Section 9 headquarters was strewn with installations like this one, reminders of what the sophonts in this building worked to protect, and it wasn't the only agency to do so.

[So yes. You can trust that I will investigate this officially and unofficially, and I will keep you appraised. But you should be aware of another source of such information: corporations. There are several large hypercops engaged in the kind of neuro-research that could fuel the development of something such as NOVUM SPIRITUS.]

Bau joined him in looking at the render, focusing on the fine interplay of the weaves, slowly picking out patterns and building a virtual model inside his head.

[Would they dare go against your government?]

[They feel safer under Council Law. Noveria is not the only extraterritorial research site they have now that we have joined the larger galactic community. The Breaking is over a century in the past; by now before the cultural memory of transhumanity. The CEOs feel safe once again. Or… they could have been subverted.]

[Cerberus?]

[Or something else. Now, Spectre Bau: can I trust you that my trust in you and in our cooperation will not backfire on transhumanity?]

[...You can. I will not see a positive development that will actively contribute to galactic security, including deeper cooperation and assistance from Section 9 and your expertise, jeopardized over this. Indeed, if we play this right… we could turn this incident into an advantage.]

[Good.]

The two men exchanged a knowing smile.

* * *

 **TECHNOLOGY** **/** **COMMUNICATION**

 **Transhuman Extranet Infrastructure**

Among the advanced species of the Citadel species, the transhuman Extranet stands out through its per-capita information density and data traffic. A singular transhuman of average standard generates on average between 3 to 5 times the common data traffic of a Citadel sophont, with spikes 10 and 15 times as high. Many transhumans generate more traffic; the highest recorded spikes range as high as 30 times the average traffic, and more. As a result, the transhuman extranet also sports a far higher density of data transmission hardware and associated server space than would expect given the transhuman population only measures in at around 100 billion sophonts.

The foundation for this extranet traffic is found in the extreme connectivity and a prevalence of not only purely digital data storage for text, video, and audio communications, but also a selection of neurological formats; ranging from exteroceptive, interoceptive, and emotive tracks used in XPs or Enhanced Personal Communication (EPC) over VR feeds to Skillsofts, Neuro-integrated Skillsets and Knowledge Bases, to Memoms and entire exocortexial uplinks. Many transhumans work with cloud-based exocortexes and other outsourced neurological augmentations; the high-fidelity, multi-layered data generated by these applications is far larger in size than comparable Citadel sophont data trails. In comparison with a Citadel sophont, who might generate around 800 mb/s in personal data traffic, a transhuman will easily produce 2.5 gb/s and more.

Adding onto sophont communications are various services and general system traffic: The Extranet of Things (ETT), though it's extremely heavily inclusion of VI, LAI and AI systems, associated heavier use of robotics, and higher component density generates on average 6 times the Citadel average in data traffic; VR applications including Simulspace Link-in streams are likewise in far heavier use, especially due to the heavily networked, physically separated nature of the transhuman Virverse. Adding onto this are hosting, communication and transmission spaces for AIs and Egos; the Mindverse that serves as hosting and communication space for an estimated 400 billion near-sophont AI applications and over a trillion non-sophont AIs as well as 100+ million egocasting sophonts makes an extremely heavy impact on the Extranet traffic due to the large file sizes regularly transmitted between servers here.

This has resulted in an extremely heavily developed Extranet; average ping from one end of transhuman space to the other end is below 10 milliseconds, and even minor habitats and colonies enjoy full FTL connectivity without rationing policies (excluding major data transfers such as mass Egocasting); planets commonly spot orbital com buoys to reduce lag.  
Ground networking is partially centralized, but also heavily distributed and peer-to-peer networked, forming the decentralized "mesh" of thousands of small computers integrated into construction, furniture, clothing and other items that permeates transhuman environments; this is used to efficiently distribute data from glass fibre backbone points into the wider environment, without dependency on heavy-duty long-range EM transceiver systems. Another common solution are wisker laser communications, bounced of static transreceivers, drones, or blimps, especially for those sophonts generating heavy data traffic.

Server space is abundant, both for storage and computing; massive planet- and spaceborne computing farms can be found all throughout transhuman space, and a few star systems have begun initiatives to construct large-scale circumsolar computing facilities, eventually expected to expand into full Dyson swarms.


	21. Welcome to Section 9 Pt 5

Togusa, Batou, Borma and Garrus didn't exchange a word as the elevator began to carry them back upwards, through the big central Zenit Rotunda, the cable-suspended work islands, offices and walkways, past the Lobby with its big reception desk and crystal chandelier, and through the levels of the various departments.

With his ARO now fully linked into Section 9' network, some AI was piping entoptic overlays into his vision, informing him where various departments were located. It also revealed more about the "Working Cluster" system the transhuman organisation seemed to use; "Iris" was one of over four dozen Work Clusters, apparently fluidly formed from groups from various departments to make flexible teams for one specific case, bringing together whomever worked the case in the field with the various investigate departments.

To Garrus, the system sounded overly complex; prone to conflict between departments, and requiring a massive degree of moment-to-moment, task-to-task coordination. _Sooo… they're probably using another AI running in the background to make it work._

"Level 45: Mission Team Alpha-01", the elevator announced, and hummed to a stop.

Borma led the way out of the doors: "Morning, Xian," he greeted the leader of a group of three transhumans waiting to enter an elevator, and received a nod in return; then the big sophont turned right and led the group down another open corridor that rounded the Zenith Sky Garden to their right.

Garrus stole another gaze after the group of three. Yes, one of the transhumans actually had blue skin and bioluminescent marks that coalesced into some form of flowing tattoos on the neck and behind the ears, clashing with the bright yellow hair. He minutely shock his head.

Also, Christian Togusa and Batou were both falling behind, forming their own separate group. _Why's that?_

"Lemme show you around", Borma offered Garrus, drawing the turians gaze back to him.

"Lead the way", Garrus just replied.

"Great. Okay, down this corridor are our offices", Borma indicated with a sweep and point of his left arm, "as you can also see on the entoptic signposts near the ceiling or at junction walls," which he indicated as well. "That's where we do most of your day-to-day work, and we also have several guest offices; that's where you can work if you're here. We also have a central work island with conference room functionality, where we commonly come together if there's something bigger and we want personal talking space."

"That happen often?"

"Yes. During my time in the army, we didn't have this many RL meetings."

"So… you were Army?"

"Yes. The public spaces are this way, halfway around the Garden. That includes the cafeteria."

"A good one?"

"I'd say so. We also stock M-Dextro-food, Biocode TI2, so no worries."

"Just for us?", Garrus asked, rasping his back teeth together in a pattern meant for switching subharmonic resonance in his larynx, adding a teasing sarcasm to his voice.

"Standard since Contact.", Borma replied, apparently oblivious to the sarcasm. Garrus translator pinged a note.

❮ Increased Stress Harmonics, Very low Level. ❯

 _Huh._

"Infocrime doesn't stop at transhuman sophonts. We had visitors like you before. Well, not Spectre's, they were somewhat… _unwelcome_ at our government organizations." The man smiled for a short moment.

"I can imagine."

"Well, yes, here we are." Borma stopped. "Toilets are in shorter intervals; again, fully bio-compatible."

"I noticed. We passed by one on our way."

"Hmmm. One piece of note; we have several androids here. If you need anything for work, just ask, and Maestro should get back to you."

"Maestro?"

"That would be me", a voice said. Garrus head flipped around.

Another transhuman of… he failed to make the identification by himself. His VI jumped in.

❮ Mediterranean. Italian phenotype primary. ❯

"So you're… Maestro."

" _Sì signore_. I'm your's personal when it comes to all matters _alimentare_. Just ask, and I'll be there for you."

"You're an AI."

"Yes. An Artificial General Intelligence to be precise. I've been in the business of supervising nourishment for entire buildings since 2182."

"That's… a long time."

"By many standards, yes. And I am quite skilled when it comes to alien cuisine. So, no worries _monsignore_ Vakarian. You are in good hands with me. Any wishes you have right now?"

"...Uh, actually, uh, no."

"Very well. Talk to you later." Maestro stepped out of his field of vision and was, when Garrus followed him a moment later, gone.

"I can't decide what is spookier," Garrus muttered. "How they just appear out of nowhere when you speak their name, or when they materialize in front of you."

Borma shrugged. "That's preference. I'd hazzard them stepping in and out it less jarring than an ARvatar materializing straight into your field of vision like a teleporter once you're used to it."

"Guess I'll find out."

Borma laughed at that. "You will. C'mon, let's get you an office and up to speed."

At the same time, Batou and Togusa had reached the laters office, and entered after a silent process of authentication. Batou noticed that the process took a few milliseconds longer. [ _Huh. Longer encryption keys?_ ]

[Actually, yes. You were issued a new ID set.]

"So, Togusa, you wanted to talk?"

"Yes." The eurasian man dropped into his seat with a suddenly tired topology.

After a second of thought, right hand massaging his scalp, he turned to Batou and made eye contact: "How do you deal with… it? With death on the… the battlefield? In combat?"

Batou seated himself and contemplated over the question for several seconds. "This because of what happened on DRAGONS LAIR?"

"Yes. Just… I don't know how to deal with this." Togusa's expression was crestfallen, mixed with stress and animalistic, primal fear bubbling up from below, his breath quickening.

Batou recognized the signs. "Togusa", he said in a stern, but warm tone of voice. "Don't go down there. Stay with me, stay here."

"Whaa-?"

"Hey!" Batou laid one big hand steadily on Togusa's shoulder. "You there? Okay, listen to me? That fear of death? That is good. Means you aren't some semi-automatic chiphead zombie. Means life means something to you, and you don't regard yourself as expendable."

"So… it's not, uh, it's-"

" _Fuck_. _No_." Batou dropped back into his chair. "Look, we never got over it either. The guys who said they did are either chipheads, idiots, or liars. It's the same shit since ever. Intellectually, we might know that our stacks record all neural activity and that in the event of death you'll get retrieved and resleeved, but that does jackshit to all the instinctual crap. Death is terrifying. Take it from me, I was there."

Batou dropped back into his seat with his trademark bang.

"And that you fear it tells me you are alright. I know it is traumatizing, especially when you get close to it, or when you get lobstered, but you have to embrace that feeling in a way. Okay? It's allright. It means you are alright."

"O… Okay. I think."

"Good." Batou looked at his friend with a bit of worry, but mostly friendly confidence. Mentally, he nudged his muse: [ _Ping Iva. I don't like to do this, but Togusa needs some professional help_.]

[On it, boss.]

"...Uh, sorry, are we interrupting?" Batou's head whipped around to the door, ready to let a sharp remark fly off his tongue - And just managed to hold it when he saw Borma and Garrus Vakarian stand in the door. The turian especially looked highly uncomfortable where he was, judging by the entoptic readings surrounding him.

"In a minute, my office, okay?"

"Sure thing." Borma closed the door with a gesture.

"...Why didn't you-"

"Let them in?"

"I thought that was good or something. You know, people and stuff?"

"First off, for now this is in between us two. Then it is between the team, and then it is between everyone. Vakarian might be a career soldier who probably has his own experience with meeting the grim reaper, but he has neither our cultural perspective nor would I confide him in at this point. This", Batou said, stabbing onto the table, "is how you give enemy intelligence ammunition. And that's not something we want at this point. Your physiometrics will tell them enough already."

"You know… I don't like this entire 'they're the enemy' attitude Togusa noted, half to himself, half to Batou.

"You think I do? I joined with the man because he had a different version than even the Alliance brass. One of cooperation instead of mistrust.

"But that doesn't mean that reality disappears. Section 9 works behind the curtain, and when it has to, in the shadows. By way of our mandate we have opposed, and still oppose the STG, the SIU, THEI and others. And we can never fully forget that all of these people still hold allegiances to wherever they came from. They're not the Alliance, Togusa - Yes they are allies. But that doesn't mean they are uncompromising friends.

"Now, let's get back to Borma and Garrus Vakarian. I'm itching to talk about something else."

"...Me too", Togusa croaked, stretching out his hand. The table reacted, guided by his muse, to a silent request, and extruded a bottle of water from a hidden-away dispenser on the right side.

The ex-detective opened it with slightly trembling hands, wiping away another tear, and drank it in big gulps.

Inside his ARO, Togusa was swiping through his medical applications. He wasn't going to use the modern smart suppressors and life editors, but between his general-use DNI and the medichine micro- and nanoswarm that inhabited his shell, he had access to a wide selection of drugware; a general-use anti-panic medication 'ware was easy to select, and set in pretty much instantly, while not punching his brain into submission in a way that would lead to withdrawal on deactivation.

He clicked the activated app away, and took a couple of deep breaths. "Okay then, Batou. Let's go."

As they approached the door, he said what was really on his mind. "And, big guy… thank you."

"No problemo."

They stepped across the floor, and into Batou's office.

Borma had taken a seat in one of the lounge chairs near the far wall and its massive holographic screen. Garrus was standing in the middle of the room, and staring at the wall. Specifically, at the awards, medals, and the big framed image of Batou's former Platoon, posing in fully loaded gear and weapons, visor's up and smiling.

"You fought at Torfan." He went straight to the point.

"And a whole lot of other places," Batou confirmed. "That a problem?" The galactic reception to BROKEN ANVIL had been mixed, if only because the Special Forces of the 7th N6 Omega had murdered their way through several battalions and suffocated over a regiment more in their bunkers, Shepard at their front.

"Oh, Spirits, no." Garrus Vakarian turned around, right claw banging into his clothing with a dry clang that revealed the armor underneath. " _Keshsravron'asar_ , as far as I am concerned, you did the galaxy a great service that day." He actually bowed before Batou. "I know you face discontent and backlash for what happened with BROKEN ANVIL, but not from me."

"And that from a turian." Batou teased.

"I am not exactly what you could call a good turian. Which is probably why… I approve so much of what you did. Rules and opinions be damned, that day you stood up and did what was right… what was just for the victims of batarian slavery, of their attacks and raids and blatant disregard of Citadel law." _And I wish I could ever have achieved a deed like that on my own. But I did not._

"...Okay." Batou was spooked out by the behavior. Garrus Vakarian switched from what was a pretty usual young man to a very formal and almost… reverencing persona with spooky regularity. Saito hadn't joked when he said the turians take warfare seriously everywhere.

"I'm sorry if that creeps you out," Garrus remarked and dropped into his own seat. "It's just… culture, you know? Same way you have AIs everywhere and massive amounts of brain and other enhancements and got back-ups… war's-"

"-you take it seriously everywhere, Saito mentioned that", Togusa remarked. "As you said, it's culture. And we might as well be honest - there's worse out there." _Like batarians and their slavery._

Garrus nodded in solemn agreement.

"So, ah, where do you come-"

[I have an incoming conference call request]

"-from, huh?". Togusa stopped mid-sentence. Everyone looked at each other.

"Uh, you got a request as well?" Togusa saw Garrus' throat was moving, and his mandibles vibrated visibly, producing a low rasping sound.

"Sorry, we turians aren't really good at silent subvocalizing. I was talking with my PAVI. And yes, I got a request too."

Batou talked with his muse and the room at large loud for the benefit of everyone: "Ivis, on the big screen, please."

His muse answered over the loudspeakers off the office.

" _No problem, boss. Linking now._ "

The aft holographic screen expanded into depth as it activated, a pentagonal virtual conference room forming beyond, with all sides transparent and showing one group of conversation partners. Two faces were occupied by the group in Analytics respective interrogations. Another captured Aramaki in his office, with an image of Bau at his side, the later apparently inside a vehicle. The fifth side was occupied by the Isis work cluster analytics group, with some investigations personal in the mix.

"Okay, before anyone comes asking what this is about", Saito preempted everyone with a raised hand, "we just got a solid lead."

"This soon?", Bau asked. "I thought-"

"-that it would take longer? We did too. But we got lucky. You see, most of the Egos we have on stack are, _were_ , unidentified. Then we got lucky and hit leads on a OFCF lieutenant.

"Long story short, we hit one of their logistics guys, and rolled him up in the queue. Me and Aetheis actually took a short Vir dive with him, and we hit gold. He not only knew the people shifted aboard the SCAS _Oliver_ , but also where they were going. And… he knew another puzzle of NOVUM SPIRITUS. Another 'associated group' is developing the delivery shell and the final payload package. But they had a preliminary version, probably among all that data they flashed and that we're still puzzling together."

"Oh, that's good. That's very good. If we get the payload…", Bosoun trailed off, a savage, toothy grin spreading across his face. "If we get it, that could shorten our work time by days. Forensics, we need to talk."

"You can after this, Bosoun, you can. In fact, why don't you come over so I can show you in person _how hard this is?!_ ", someone in the fourth face snapped at Bosoun, who raised his arms in defence.

"Guys, let's cool it," Ishikawa intervened. "I think the location is far more important."

"So," Bau's head and torso leaned forward in his holographic image. "Where are they headed, Agent Saito?"

"Bekenstein. They're headed for a rendezvous on Bekenstein, at a private Villa, in two days. And there," Saito took a breath, "there, they will pass the NOVUM SPIRITUS package onto a new contact."

There was silence. But every transhuman in the group crossed their arms, and Togusa's face was an open grimace of distaste, caught in old memories.

"I think we'll be packing for a field trip," Garrus finally quipped.

"Oh Garrus - you have no idea," Aetheis replied.

Togusa nodded. "Bekenstein… is gonna get ugly. That planet didn't get the nickname "Transhumanity's Illium" for nothing."

 _End of Arc I - Discovery_

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** So yeah, this segment took a bit longer to write and perfect; beginning the writing process on the prequel Interference Point helped, however, with bringing the entire writing process forward.

So, Bekenstein. The first bread crump of the trail... and the watch dogs are on.


	22. Before the Party Pt 1

[SAIN\\\MIN\\\IV/OUN\\\s9\\\newsfeeds\op_compile\\\ ]

 **Keyword: Bekenstein**  
 **Generating Media Stream/...**

 _Fast. Intelligent. Eloquent. Beautiful. The new Antaeus 10 series Bioroid. For You and Your Life._ _...Behind me, the Bekenstein fashion week is in full swing here at Nuovo Milano, with many prominent Egos arriving for the Safaish Bodyworks presentation tonight. Safaish is expected to present some of its newest cosmetic and functional fashion modifications today, which have caused extranet rumors for weeks at this point…_

 _...Unveiling the new Ferrari 900X. Uncompromising speed and mobility, superior enjoyment. No trigraphic panes; all c-allotrope glass driver cabin. With the new molded control sticks, you will feel your ride like never before…_

 _...So, you know, the current debate about modesty in fashion and body modification got another big kick yesterday with all the various unveilings. The big forums and social media platforms are going ballistic right now, and we got over a billion sophonts discussing this, so, you know, kinda big deal. Now, about me? Well, I think this is going too far. Let's be honest, we don't have to surpass the Asari when it comes to revealing cuts in clothing..._

* * *

Arc II - Trail

* * *

"'Kay, that would be case number 16, Sniper Rifles 1," Saito grunted as he lifted the big turian weapon case onto the table of the armory. "...Uh." The lock of the case flashed an angry red at him.

"Oh, that's my personal case." Garrus came over and pressed a right claw onto the display, waited the three seconds it took the surface to sample his handprint and DNA-equivalent, then tipped in a long turian scripture lock code. The case beeped a friendly acceptance, and unlocked with a click and hiss of the breaking vacuum seals. "Be careful, please?" The turian joked and turned back to inspecting the series of salarian assault weapons that had been shuttled over on a big palette, before slotting them into the free spaces in the armory.

"No, you know, I will treat these with les-", Saito stopped and very carefully reached into the case. "...holy shit, is that a MSR-452 Mod 127 _Iskara_?" He lifted the smooth, gunmetal black weapon into the air, accelerator, grip and stock fully extended, awkwardly holding it by the turian-spec moulded grip, trigger group and angled foregrip, turning it over in his hands.

Garrus spread his mandibles in a turian smile and came over after carefully slotting a WCR-56T Disciple into place. "That's my personal rifle from the Force Recon days, yes." He watched as Saito lowered the weapon onto the table and withdrew his hands. "Ever wanted to shoot one?"

"I got to use the Mod 124 'til 26 during my soldiering days." Saito scratched the Blue Suns tattoo on his neck. "Always wanted to use the Mod 127, but I never got my hands on it." He pointed at the far side of the room. "Not that I don't mind my arsenal, but the _Iskara_ left an impression. Fast, precise, low heat generation, and a shitload of ammunition blocks for selection."

"Yeah well, turian vet foundation of the 122nd Legion. We basically get these things thrown after us, and when they heard I was in C-SEC Special Response as a sniper… I got this baby. Rest of the add-ons I bought and got done with a friendly weapon smith."

"Now I'm getting jealous," Saito remarked.

"You're the one who has a cybernetic ballistic computer I could only dream off and gets to fire superheavy AMRs as part of his job. That isn't exactly something on my resume." Garrus chinned at the series of heavy rifles, including a Titan Linear MX9 30mm recoilless coilgun, Saito had arrayed on a side table of the ship armory.

"Fair point. Though… would you get a Lockheed Cybernetics Hawkeye installed?" Saito looked at him critically.

"Maybe… well okay, probably not. It's a pretty dedicated augmentation. More likely I'd get the neural wiring and wear the sensors externally."

Saito nodded. "At least you're honest. Lockheed sold something like 150 million Hawkeye-XT units last year; that isn't exactly an impressive reception rate."

"Sorry if I seemed grandstanding."

"Oh, it's okay, you turians aren't the worst bunch on the block when it comes to augmentations. Now asari… I met some really highborn _Aya'savis_ in the Terminus, those were an experience." Saito scoffed. "Biochauvinistic all the way." The transhuman shook his head.

Underneath them, the deck seemed to shift for an instant as the ICS reacted to shifting acceleration vectors. "Weren't we supposed to be in FTL transit for-"

"-longer than 2 minutes, yes," Saito confirmed. He directed his query into the air of the room: "Bridge, Armory, is something the matter?"

The D-MC answered him: "Armory, Bridge, we are conducting deep-space transfer of a Special Mission Package for your operation at this time; we'll be underway in T-Minus 10 minutes."

"Many thanks, bridge." The D-MC cut out, replaced by the 1-MC: " ** _All hands, all hands, we are conducting a deep space package transfer by automated tug at this time. Secure for close maneuvering._** " That meant the crew had to evacuate compartments close to the hull in case of a crash. " ** _Flight deck teams in Lower Cargo Hangar, secure the 'lock and prepare for the transfer aboard. That is all._** "

Maneuvering thrusters could be heard in the distance, mixing with the throttling wine of the mains and secondaries working on adjusting the vector. Saito shrugged. "We'll know soon enough what's aboard there."

"Think they…," Garrus said and imitated a human gesture by thumbing at the ceiling, "will talk about it at the first briefing?"

"Yeah. If we do this Major style, that's where we'll plan out a lot of stuff, so the SMP will definitely come up." Saito picked up the Iskara and slotted it into the armory shelf after another moment of admiring the flanks of the weapon. "Till then, we can only wait."

* * *

 **=[ Chapter 6 - Before the Party ]=**  
-| May 20th, 2232 |-

* * *

The mansion grounds were massive; spanning several square kilometers, according to the fact sheet that hovered above the grounds.

Aetheis casually stepped over the fence and forest at its southern perimeter and turned towards the main building, walking up the hills, through the complexly cut bushes and trees. Arranged with colorful gravel and equally colorful species selections that painted the grounds in colors of green, yellow, orange, pink and violet. The geometrically masoned rocks imbued with holographic nanite etching, and stopped in the area of the driveway and the lower terraces.

The asari turned around, watching the skyline. Boltzmann stood high in the sky, bright and warming her face, letting the low-slung glass facades of _Nouveau Venise_ glitter down below at the cost, and lighting the spacecraft descending towards the spaceports at New Florence to the North-east, all skyscrapers and superstructures.

Humans were weird, especially the culture they identified as "Pan-European". Apparently, the Systems Alliance harbored several cities named after the sunken and reconstructed city "Venice" on their homeworld Earth, and the Europeans had used a different one from one of their many languages to name their colonial cities each time after the same city. It was as if whatever council had thought up the names lacked in creativity.

The architecture at least was nice and civilized; towering and spiraling and she recognized a whole sprawl of buildings that could only come from the Master Artisans of the Kalia Republic, judging by the colorful symbols created through colored panes of glass.

The estate was similarly decorated in installations from multiple species, through the main building…

"Excuse me, but what kind of style is that?" She stemmed her hands into the sides.

"Welcome to the Neo-Italian style of Angelo Casella Di Sanza, prized architect of the _Nouveau Venise_ Terraces. Looks wonderful, doesn't it?" Christian Togusa remarked sarcastically as he strolled onto the estate himself, his Avatar wearing a simple, comfortable black shirt and suit trousers. His hair however, was in a different style than usual, and a small headset was clipped behind one ear. "And no, I don't get the idea either, but it's an old Bekenstein rage that hasn't burned itself out yet. It's supposed to meld early 21st Modern with the old Mediterranean style."

She just nodded and something inside her hated herself for missing the cultural knowledge to truly understand what the transhuman was talking about. Her PAVI couldn't really help her; and she had to admit she had ignored transhumans at large. Small and upcoming, they had not exactly managed to shake her worldview, especially culturally, and even less for architecture. The pictures she saw all seemed to show the same kind of cities the galaxy over - glass, smooth architectures, polished and advanced, with some unique quirks, but nothing world-shaking.

Evidently, she had to admit, she had been wrong. She began to understand why some asari were crazy for old European architecture and culture, an area that had, to her understanding, thrown quite the waves in the Republics. The unique fusion of marble columns, arches and stone with modern, smooth geometric shapes and lots of open glass had some appeal, specially when mixed with the statues and greenery around the mansion proper.

Around them, the remaining team members of the newborn cooperative group joined the AI-generated and -moderated Vir. Bau looked around appreciatively, then inhaled deeply. Salarians had a surprisingly sensitive nose of complex tissue their amphibian ancestors had passed onto them, useful for sampling both the air and water, and after a second, the alien nodded.

"Very good sense generation; lots of complex smells, and it smells _right_."

Ishikawa smiled under his virtual beard. "I sure hope so. This Vir model is derived of the same software used in high-end simulspace environs for long-term habitation; this space right here", he turned with outspread arms, "is essentially indistinguishable from reality if we weren't in here as Giants."

"And ending that elaboration," Motoko Kusanagi took the lead, "let's begin the briefing and planning session for Operation PARTY CRASHER". She spread a hand across the not-architectural model house.

"Before us is the main housing and public building of Pierre Adriens, illustrious host of the upcoming party where our Intel indicates NOVUM SPIRITUS will be handed over from what we now call Cell Alpha to Cell Beta, operating somewhere in this area of space. Most of this complex is dedicated to housing and supporting the massive parties and gala events Adriens is famous for, as well as housing a 'business home' where Adriens conducts deals and meets people in private.

His personal annex lies just beyond," she pointed at a second building complex that had been constructed further up the hillside, "where Adriens and his consorts actually live, work and sleep. The personal annex is also far better protected; we know that Deep Six Solutions, a PMC where Adriens is majority shareholder, has an entire reinforced company protect the building in shifts."

The real world blinked out and was replaced by a digital wireframe model.

"This is our first problem. Adriens will very likely store the data in a secure location where both parties can conduct the handover separately, ensuring no direct meeting takes place; this means one of three vault sites under the property."

Three wireframe rooms lit up on que, connected by staircases or long corridors the estate proper above them and surrounded by other rooms.

"Adriens has two main vaults; one is a general storage vault for valuables, the other a dedicated datavault with isolated servers and upload stations. Furthermore, Adriens also possesses a private vault in his personal estate, with a small separate datavault. Either of those three could store NOVUM SPIRITUS.

"The social event that'll serve as both the handover point and our chance to infiltrate Adriens' estate most covertly is a big party for various figures he is throwing tomorrow. The illustrious list is full of Bekenstein's finest, as well as several guests from beyond; and all of them are involved in shady business of some kind, from weapons over mil tech to vehicles and starships, and the mercs that use them."

Behind Kusanagi, a massive list of portraits appeared, sorting themselves into relationship trees; name and physical characteristics were listed together with a list of keywords. "Smuggling", "Illegal tech" and "Military hardware" appeared very often, Garrus noted.

"Quite a lot of turians," he remarked.

"Hmmm. Adriens is well connected on Bekenstein and beyond; the man could be seen as one of the ringleaders of white-collar crime in the Citadel corner of transhuman space," Togusa said, sitting on a folding chair on the virtual lawn. "Documented connections all the way into the Terminus."

"Lovely."

"How do we get in?" Aetheis asked.

"Up front, not all of us can infiltrate this event," Bau explained. "Adriens' party is a _shavesk_ -infested water, and most of us would stand out too much without heavy psycho-masking."

 _Oh, I know where this goes._

"Additionally, we cannot carry heavy weaponry into the estate - but there's a zero chance we will manage to completely ghost in and out of the building, considering the security around the vaults," Kusanagi explained.

"That leaves those people here with ingrained offensive and defensive capacity and the skills to use them, and skill for being social chameleons."

"Which means biotics," Aetheis concluded.

The Major nodded and turned to the entire group. "Aetheis, Raven, and me are the best choice of people for this operation. We can all fight with weapons small enough to smuggle in."

"How?"

"Internal compartments. Both me and Raven are augmented enough to smuggle in weaponry for us and you as well. Including a segmented _Sequalla'shar_. Any remaining armaments we'll take as we go. We also have the option of subverting on-site security for our purposes."

"The rest of the team?"

"Heavy assault and sniper support," Bau took back over. "That's for example why Saito is missing from the infiltrator team. He and Garrus will provide the sniper overwatch over the mansion."

"Heavy assault?"

"We'll be posing as a small elite merc group. When it comes to hostilities due to the infiltration, we'll stage a diversion outside, force Deep Six Solutions to split their attention and dedication between a threat to the entire party and Adriens, and the infiltrators. Hopefully that will be enough to draw them off the infiltrators long enough to make the exfil."

"And if not?" Raven asked. "Look, this has a lot of ifs attached. Why don't we knock down the doors officially?"

"Because we can't on short notice," Paz interjected. "We're all there is, and-"

"-going to the local police would be a bad idea. That means Adriens would get advance warning, and NOVUM SPIRITUS gets axed and our POIs scattered into the wind," Togusa took over. "Neither the Bekenstein PPD nor the local police are not our friend here, unfortunately. The good news is that they're less likely to react quickly due to this; until they have their cards stacked right, we'll be undisturbed on shooting up the front for over five minutes. More if we lock down any information from the estate, which we can easily do."

"Less easily so without leaving big ugly footprints, but hey, then Section 9 comes in and… _investigates_." Ishikawa winked with one eye. "But I don't think it will come to that. We're essentially riding off an AIS Internal Security Operations OPLAN here, and they planned _well_."

Aetheis shook her heads. "You had a prepared OPLAN for this?"

"One of hundreds of options. And up to date. AI time's cheap these days, and ISO is paranoid to the n-th degree. Besides, it does pay off doesn't it?"

"Were you the voice of violence here, sir?" She turned towards Bau. "This doesn't completely sound like an intelligence service operation."

The Spectre smiled thinly. "This is probably our last chance of nailing NOVUM SPIRITUS before it escapes into Council space, and then things get a little more _complicated_." The salarian spat the word out with clear distaste. "Better to use as much force as we can right now and where it becomes surprisingly easy to sweep this incident under the carpet. Our cover identities will vanish into the depths of darkness, scuttled if necessary, and Adriens will not kick off a big investigation less his own involvement and shady deals be discovered in the process."

The asari nodded. "So. How does this work out in detail?"


	23. Before the Party Pt 2

"So you really weren't joking."

Garrus looked at the two white caskets that hovered by through the corridor outside the armory and preparations room, escorted by two androids each.

"If you could move out of the way please, Sir?", another white-faced humanoid asked him, easily carrying the huge box Garrus recognized as a military storage container for Power Armor.

"Wha? Yeah, sure." He stepped aside, turning towards Saito, Batou and Borma who were busy readying equipment alongside Voto'Leelas. "Some part of me still thought the talk of changing Shells for the occasion was a joke."

"Oh no, it wasn't", Batou said, lifting a heavy case of large-capacity heatsinks onto the table where it landed with a composite-on-metal clang. "This is pretty much standard; can go from Skin replacement to braincase transfer to resleeving to Biomodelling. These days you don't wear masks - you become them."

"This happen often?"

"Actually, no, even though it's always there on the table. Contrary to what some people say or think, reshelling is always traumatic in some capacity. Your body never quite behaves like the old one, and the more changes there are, the more impactful that is. It's not something done casually, the same as with resleeving."

Saito chimed in. "Which is actually why we use the same fake skin techniques, masking and rapid neuro-learning techniques as you whenever possible, or have dedicated AIs play the person for the event. But in this case, we need our people in there, so they have to get under and get customized." He put four big polymer magazines loaded with 12mm Railgun Sabots next to his rifle.

"Well, Aetheis is not", Garrus remarked, rejoining the group and pulling sealed ammo blocks from boxes, laying them out akin to to a list on his ARO. Most of the munition was anti-robotic; tungsten penetrator flechettes and disruptor pulsars, mixed with a late Merc favorite - Davron Arms ShreddX Anti-personal rounds, which had experienced a recent spike in popularity for their capability to put down cyborgs and synths as easily as biological bodies, leaving large and grizzly wounds that took longer to fix in the field.

Batou snorted. "Probably better so. She's the least accustomed to what we do, and how - and she visibly jolted when the alterations for the infiltrators were brought up. At least she can deal with the available Spectre tech for that." He procured empty grenade magazines from below the table and began slotting 30mm Gauss grenades home with his thumb, picking them out of an open box one at a time.

"Yeah, but that won't be comfortable either." Everyone looked at Voto'leelas, the quarian going over a sortiment of drone quick-fabrication components. "Those asari masking skins need some form of interface so they don't cut off skin conductivity and reduce the signal strengths on simple asari-asari skin contact, so she's gonna get stuck with microscopic needles everywhere, and that's uncomfortable."

Batou stopped stacking heatsinks into the magazine tube of a turian HMRS-62 Mk.21 Kaskal LMG, sliding them in from the charging port at the side.

"Huh. Didn't know that. On the other hand, our people have to get their heads opened and deal with reshelling shock, plus transference itself. That stuff isn't pleasant."

"What is it like?", the Quarian asked, leaning forward, and Garrus looked up as well, only paying half attention as he typed in requests on a tablet.

"From personal experience? Really disorienting, no matter how much they work on your brain to map your new body to your mind. The alienation can be disorienting to say the least; in the worst case you get outright rejection and the Ego looks up. If that happens, they have no choice but to knock you out and pull you from the Shell… if that's still possible. And well, it gets worse if you get into a non-humanoid shell. One guy I knew decided to go girl and almost locked up during his first period. It ain't an easy or even a common process."

Saito nodded. "I had a few Reshellings and two resleeves by now… for a biotic it's even more disorienting because a part of yourself is just…. gone. Utterly. It's like you've become paraplegic. Not a nice experience."

"You know, that's a question I always wondered myself… does it, you know, hurt? To get a cyberbrain, I mean. Or get… reshelled."

"Depends on how you'd like it installed. Some people just get themselves a customized cyberbrain and shell and resleeve. That's a bit of prep-time for growing the brain and getting the surgery done, but for themselves it's just three hours in the 'bridge and they're over."

"In my case, I got a true braincase when I joined the Rangers", Batou explained, "and I received it with surgery. That meant I was in nanosurgery for two days, getting the basics grown, before they linked me up to a sim for three hours while they cut my head open and got the brain out before fitting the rest of the casing. Didn't feel or notice a thing the entire time, the process is seamless. You don't even get the rumored half hour as a disembodied brain or bad dreams or somesuch."

"During the first surgeries back in the 21st they knocked the people out cold, and the surgery took longer because red nanoassembly wasn't quite as advanced as it is today, but it was the same deal."

"And it's the same during a transfer. Common practise is to link you into a Vir, activate the cyberbrain's life support, then open up the headcase and pull it out, bring it over, plug it in and letting everything sync up slowly. Then they pull you out of the Vir and get you acclimatized."

Garrus nodded, pulling on gloves with padded cabs.

"Why the gloves?", Borma asked.

"So he doesn't pull the 'blocks apart," Saito answered for Garrus. "It's standard turian soldier kit, their armored gloves are treated in the same manner. Claws aren't advantageous for everything."

"And that is one of the a reason we use omnitool apps for our _skadarc_ ," Garrus interjected, feeding a block into his Carnifex, "the second being that unless we're a Titan's Chosen, our claws won't cut modern combat armor." He closed the slot and cycled the weapon, listening to the sharp "click" of the shaver loading rounds into its feeder drum.

Togusa and Bau stepped into the armory, both wearing their species' version of undersuits for combat armor like the rest of the team. They both nodded in greeting, then they cut past the group readying the weapons and towards the caskets with the armor.

"We need two more people", Bau asked the group. "Garrus and me are essentially done," Batou said. [If you could take care of the ammo blocks?], he asked Borma over Com.

[Knock yourself out, I'll get it done.] The cyborg dropped the Titan Armories Linear Assault Cannon he had been working on with a shrug and a virtual glance at Saito. The sniper was still busy testing the optics of the arsenal of long-range weapons he had prepared with the turian using a large diagnostic rig.

"'The big black boxes here on the right are the transhuman suits. That'd be the Calipso Armory ETOPAs for our transhuman mainline and the big Jormungand suits for our two heavies, me and Borma." Batou pointed at the four big containers one one side.

"These ones over here are the ones for your team", he pointed to the other side, "the requested _Kavalas_ custom Heavy Power Armor for you, Bau, fitted with the hybrid outfit, and the units for Garrus and the rest of your assault team."

Bau nodded. "Let me call Kamius, Virina and Kaelus down here, and we can get started on the smaller equipment in the meantime."

"And that would be in the two boxes on the floor over there."

Batou grabbed one of the massive yellow rigs that rested in a corner of the armory room and pulled it, by its ceiling rail, next to one of the upright cases. He popped open the door and looked at the Jormungand MCS-21 _Angrboda_ suit within, big-shouldered, bulky torso with a melded teardrop helmet cavity, and sporting robotic hands instead of armored, power-amplified gloves. Carefully, he removed the belts holding the combat system in its cavity.

"Let's… get this done", he pressed out as he carefully lifted the heavy suit of armor out of its padding, and half-slammed it into the rig, a bit too hard. "Batou!", Borma chastised him. "Use the damn waldos to load them over. Those _Angrbodas_ weight a good 500 kilos. You aren't lifting that at this kind of leverage angle."

Batou worked his shoulders as if after a good workout. "Yeah?"

" _Yes_."

Bau pinged Togusa on a private channel, texting instead of coming: [Are they always like this?]

Togusa replied after a second:[Fast typing speed. And yes, they are. For one, Batou has a… martial fixation. And Borma is very down to earth. And they both served in the same Ranger unit. It's their normal teasing. You get used to it.]

Bau suppressed the salarian snort that was sneaking itself onto the surface. Yes, here in this environment, the true character was starting to show more.

* * *

In the Mission Medical Bay, Raven and Aetheis were sitting opposite of each other on two of the spare beds, watching the medical staff open the transport and storage stasis caskets and extract the two Shells contained within.

Both women (as far as the later term was applicable to asari) wore only basic clothing at this point, waiting for their individual operations to start.

When Bau had transferred a lot of gear and personal aboard the SSV Fujibayashi Nagato, he had also brought reserve medical equipment, including the gear necessary to install the Citadel's bleeding edge in personal mimicry gear. Now Doctor T'Vasori was busy preparing the masking skin for "printing" onto her skin; with her body suspended inside a mass effect field, the special printer array would assemble the second skin part by microscopic part, until her entire skin was covered by a synthetic skin of obfuscating materials.

The african-asian women was watching with dark, brown-grey eyes as the asari looked at the Med techs preparing the two shells for transfer. The bodies were stiff like corpses, locked up in a phantom _rigor mortis_ , dressed in minimal one-piece suits dotted with minute sensor nets ready to be cabled up at strategic placed contact interface points. They were placed on the large, moulded beds, then the techs changed some invisible configuration and the bodies relaxed, dropping into the contours.

Next came the cables. Hidden hatches opened themselves, as power and data cables sneaked in; plugging in at the sides of the head and in the spine, and muscles flicked with contractions as the medical team ran final checks on the Shells' functionalities, pricking them in places, shining lights into their eyes.

Finally, one of them came over. "We're ready to start."

Raven flexed her hand, open and close, open and close. "5 minutes, please."

"Yes ma'am."

Aetheis saw Motoko Kusanagi stand up from her own chair where she had settled down, calm and controlled, and head over for the bed right next to the empty-brained Shell destined for her.

 _She's done this before. Or she's too far gone. Could certainly be the later._

"Is this how the transhuman future ends?"

"Pardon?", Raven asked, looking up from her flexing hand, stopping the fixation.

Her eyes bored into those of Aetheis, hardening by the second.

Inside Aetheis, something _clicked_ , and the world slowed down, changed, as deep social wiring activated inside her brain, began picking the conversation partner apart.

It was the natural ability that powered the asari society at a deep level, a natural capability of analytics that only truly unlocked at a deep level when faced with something, someone who was an asari, or like an asari.

With transhumans, no matter how alien they were on a rational level, the instinct kicked in with a nearly identical power, though some sense of the foreign, alien remained - and was reinforced every once in awhile on a particular interaction.

She picked out the minute details. The transhuman eyes were natural to the point of perfect imitation even though most likely they were synthetic replicas, complex ceramics, alloys and weaves at best mimicking tissue functionality on a mechanical level, most likely a bionic mixture of hard and soft components that added functionalities to simple vision. Infrared. UV. Visual acuity that surpassed the best of biological baseline by way of synthetic receptor elements and superior, microscopic lense arrays, synchronized on a far more intelligent level than nature managed.

Or so the brochures and briefings on transhuman soldiers went. And that was apparently only scratching the surface.

The iris was beautiful, a mixture of blues and greys with minute highlights of blue dots smattered across the edge, having a certain depth to it, the artisan crater that mantled the central blackness of the pupil. If there were any synthetic components, they were masked well. Unlike asari eyes, which had reflective amplification components for seeing in the dark, these eyes didn't flitter at all, any self-reinforcement components masked.

The skin around the eyes was perfect imperfection, hovering at the edge of an uncanny valley that didn't quite manifest. The transhuman morphology, especially the female one, was eerily similar to the asari phenotype; enough to bypass the sense of uncanny valley both species had. It had wrinkles, a topology that wasn't just ulterior smooth skin, without the scaling qualities of asari skin, featuring minute imperfections and weathering that showed a certain age - and yet, it was more the skin of a model than that a soldier, too perfect, to unblemished for the later.

Muscles were flexing under the skin, twisting the face - purging it of emotion. Above the eyes, the jameisa- no, the eyebrows were contracting together, projecting mistrust and anger, the eyes hardening as they refocused, and made eye contact, beginning a staring contest.

 _Why?_

"Nothing," Aetheis deflected, regretting the decision to talk out loud, to seek… confrontation. Transhumans had extremely acute memory on par with the drell, if some augmentation wasn't mirroring their senses and thoughts; Raven would have no issue recalling her murmured remark if she wanted to.

Something flared within the expression, something…. Familiar? Very familiar at that, strangely so.

"Are you sure?", the transhuman asked, leaning backward to seize up her conversation partner, her… _opponent_.

"How can she do this so easily?"

They both looked over to where Motoko Kusanagi had laid back and closed her eyes, allowing the tech to connect several cables to her… Shell, Aetheis forcefully reminded herself of the transhuman term.

"Miss Motoko Kusanagi, do you give your consent for the Shell transfer?", one of the medical techs asked.

"I do." The transhuman closed her eyes, and her body stiffened up.

" _Shell is in transfer mode, confirmed lock_."

"Okay. Open the headcases."

Aetheis watched with fascination as on both heads, the once long hair retracted, pulling further and further inward, until it only formed short, dense stubbles on the head. Then, seams began appearing, slowly etching themselves into the skin, drawing shapes on the heads of both shells.

Then, slowly, like strange petals, they parted, and opened, hinging away, exposing the internal works of the Shells.

"The Shell transfer?", Raven asked, and Aetheis nodded.

As organic as the surface seemed, underneath lay medical-grey composite material, patterned in several layers to create mechanical grip with what lay contained within; whatever conduits supplied the skin were invisible under the sealed surface. The only thing one could see were gleaming connectors, peaking from the composite surface and gleaming with an alloy sheen, and fine clusters of electrodes.

From her position, the cyberbrain wasn't visible; shadowed behind the sides.

"She doesn't. She only hides it, but even for her, slipping into a new Shell is a challenge. But she's well-versed. It's not as hard as it is… for me." The woman worked her hand again, twitching it in a pseudo-motion of a sloppy mnemonic gesture, flaring her biotics. Aetheis felt the harmonics of the nodules humming, thrumming with neuro-digital impulses as commands mixed with biotic amp amplification.

The robotic arm that moved in onto the open head looked surprisingly like a brain surgeon system. It had lots of small manipulators, sealed in white medical plastic, and hooked into whatever was inside the head with tiny mechanical clicks.

" _Arrest on braincase_ ," an AI voice reported.

"Disconnect?"

" _Primed. Executing now_." Now there were audible sounds, a series of clicks and a strange organic sound, something disconnecting.

" _Spine port is out. Cyberbrain on full internals. Extracting_."

Aetheis looked in a strange mixture of fascination and revulsion as the cyberbrain became visible.

It looked… far less strange than she had expected.

The casing was predominately a dark grey, with a slightly patterned surface that seemed to be designed to grip the counterparts in the head casing. It was shaped just like a brain, with a short spinal column. The most noticeable features were the various gleaming alloy ports and a dense network of electrode clusters that covered almost every surface; other bits of the surface shimmered with a strange, almost holographic contrast.

"I thought…", Aetheis began.

"No. It never is. I had… one reshelling in my entire life, and it… impacted me deeply. You can throw off your shackles; but the memory of chains remains, and only fades with time."

 _Very poetic._

There were few other markings; white and grey alien script, a few red and orange symbols; a big QR code on the center, for identification purposes.

The strangest part were the pseudo-organic structures that sprouted from several places in short, semi-transparent strands; below the main ridge of the forward cyberbrain, from the short synthetic spine, and from the sides, weaving to an invisible wind, searching. Some form of synthetic neuronal strands? That would match the positions for visual and auditory nerves.

"Good transfer. Internal neuronal activity telemetry looks good, patient is in solid Vir."

The human med tech nodded. "Prepare cyberbrain insertion, run a last diagnostic."

The other med tech came back over, looking inpatient and only masking it partially. He turned to Raven: "If we could then, Ma'am? You have more than 8 hours, and the transfer Vir will give you additional time. We're always ready to jump in. The Hanka index here is less than 0.6 alpha; you'll adjust quickly."

Raven took a deep breath, and nodded. "I'm ready. Best of luck to you."

"See you… see you on the other side."

"See you new You." Raven stood up and headed for her own bed.

"And I guess that is my cue. We're ready as well." T'Vasori had a calm smile on her face.

"They're fascinating, aren't they?" She gazed over at the transhumans, now both in the Limbo of "reshelling", with Kusanagi's cyberbrain already mating with the new Shell, slowly inching into place inside its cavity.

"In every sense of that word", she agreed, unlocking the smart cloth robe by pressing at the release pad on her chest.

The air of the room felt comfortably warm, an effect created by directional IR emissions from the moulded light bulbs of twisted OLED strips in the ceilings, and she carefully laid down onto the masking cradle.

The smart gel molded itself to her back, and she closed her eyes.

"Ready?"

She swallowed. This was going to be… painful, despite everything.

 _But not as bad as the transhumans, it seems. I suppose I am privileged._

"Ready."

"Setting the 'block." A device pressed against her neck, and attached with a prickling sensation. Then her body feeling went numb, and dead.

"And blocked. Beginning the print process now. 30 minutes."

Aetheis closed her eyes and took in a deep calming breath, activating her ARO by way of the neural bypasses installed in her arms, the motor neurons numbed like everything else but still permitting the minute keys the system needed to work. Soon, she was immersed in a TSI, as the arms hummed to work around her and began printing the ground layer of the masking skin onto her, microscopic needles twisting and penetrating between cells into the epidermal layers.


	24. Before the Party Part 3-1

The first breath was like a birth. Deep, painful, primitively impactful.

She gasped, inhaled. Her back arched, arms rising into the air.

 _Memories. Remembrance. Familiarity._

A chain reaction raced through neural clusters, sent neurotransmitters flooding into the augmented tissue, and Raven reached for her niotics, mind grasping for the deep instinctive control of the amp.

The controls were there, but no reaction followed, no cascade of carefully modulated neural impulses racing out, triggering dark energy fields, inducing the tingling feeling of the fields, creating the feedback loop that leads towards a stable sleight.

⟨ Sirta Foundation L7 Protector-9X Biotic Amp ⟩  
⟬ Medical Lockout in Effect ⟭

The only thing she produced without the amp was a weak fizzle of an interference field for creating a barrier, slightly repulsing the calm hands that pressed down onto the bed. Even limited, her strength was still considerable, and one could injure his Shell during the wake-up after a Reshelling.

"Take it easy, take it easy." She tried to focus, and went slightly cross-eyed as she failed to align properly on instinct, overcorrecting from the already adjusted instinctual setting on habit. "Relax, and don't think about movement - Do it."

"That's a- _llll_ ", she lisped, and switched to Com: [ _Remarkably useless advice._ ] At least _that_ still worked as usual.

Raven worked her new mouth and tongue, sliding the new organ over meticulously clean teath.

In fact, the mouth was far too clean. Dry and sterile as a slab of medical plastic.

"Mouth too clean?" the doctor asked, clearly amused as he grabbed a glass of fruit juice. "Drink carefully. I don't want you to swallow down the wrong tube. If you have any difficulties, slow down or stop, okay?" She looked at Raven, who nodded after a second.

 _You've done this before. This is no different. You can do this._

 _\- #}-~*  
"Congratulations Raven. Welcome to your New You."  
-*#* =)-~*_

"-Think she's experiencing some flashbacks."

"Medical suppressor on that, please. I don't want her locking up right now."

 _#}-..._

"Raven, can you hear me?"

A moment of silence, as she processed the answer, feeling her head clear up.

"Yes."

"Good. You're already coming in full and smooth. Your fine motor control is already coming back to normal from the Vir."

A line shone into both of her eyes for a moment."Now, let's get you into the rest of your Shell. For a start, let's sit up. Again, slowly."

Doctor Alane watched as the woman slowly sat up, sliding her arms back and using them to work herself up on the bed.

[How is she doing?]

[Still a lot of flickering. Good news is that her sensory input has stabilized, and so has her Body Image. Motor control's her main issue, and balance, together with biotics], the Med-Bay's overseeing AGI, Anahit, answered, sending her several AROWs showing neural activity and Shell telemetry, highlighting points of conflict as well as reconciled systems with red, orange and green. The first and the last dominated; partial reconciliation had already been erased during the transition Vir, designed and controlled to smoothly introduce the main changes to the new Shell. Raven was fighting her Shell under control in good time.

[Okay. Neurokinetics?]

[...Go.]

"Okay, we're going to work on fine motor control now, starting with your fingers." She placed herself at the end of the bed, facing Raven who had managed to stabilize herself in a sitting position, through she was waving ever so slightly and from time to time twitched as muscles tensed up. "Just do as I do. Lift your left hand…" She lifted her right.

"Try to connect thumb and index finger, tip on tip." She showed the motion, slowly.

Raven failed on her first try, not used to the longer, more slender fingers, and snapped the two fingers together.

"Remember, take it slow, and trust your brain. It knows how to use this body, but you need to let it. Now, try again. Don't concentrate on it."

This time, Raven managed to do better, first pressing thumb and index finger of her left hand gently, rebounding, then managing a more solid touch, though the index trembled slightly.

"Very good. Now thumb and middle finger."

Next to them, Kusanagi was going through the same routine with Doctor O'Donnell, her motions smoother; thumb and index snapping together on the first try, if offset from one another; the Major opened her hand and closed it again, this time hitting true. The thumb and middle finger worked even better, almost snapping together at speed; she needed two tries for the thumb and ring finger, as Raven still struggled with getting thumb and middle finger together, taking slower and more unsure movements, also glancing at her arms and chest from time to time, nervously shifting on her unfamiliar behind.

Her new Shell had far more boosted secondary sexual characteristics, and subdued muscle groups; in contrast with her past military Shell which, while good for all forms of social interaction, had placed bodily strength, size and endurance over social compatibility and pleasure. But, under the surface, she could feel the currently locked-out power of military augmentations; extreme-power synthetic muscle,concealed combat and support augmentations, and the holsters build into her limbs for storing weapons and gear.

She also had to admit she liked her new look, appealing to a different side of her character she only now realized was there not only as a crippled remnant of her humanity. Her skin was a smooth light brown, highlight with a few strips of violett of a slightly darker shade than her normal skin, and a few discrete, patterned skinlights in orange and white, smoothly glowing under the skin.

She reached the thumb and pinkie, and switched to the other hand, slowly speeding up. Sure of her success, she immediately failed to control her right hand's thumb and index finger properly, her brain switching back to her old memories of the right hand. She grimaced and felt her cheeks heat very slightly before the new Shell stopped the reaction and masked the embarrassment.

That felt reassuring, and she rode the positive emotion to relax into the neurokinetic exercises. After finishing the finger touching exercise in pretty good spirits, she was handed an exercise ball and instructed to squeeze it, massaging her hands and getting used to applications of force; this was followed by a special hand press and a partial unlocking of her full military strength. "Squeeze as hard and fast as you can," Doctor Alane instructed her. She did, and her hand snapped closed around the tool.

On her ARO, Alane watched the readouts snap towards maximum, and the window lit up with satisfied green numbers for strength, speed and power draw, and nominal neural signaling. The Body Image reprogramming they had performed after the Braincase transfer was fully settling in, and getting Raven instinctively accustomed with her new Shell.

"It's starting to feel better", Raven remarked.

"And it is getting better, fast," Alane assured her. "You are doing good."

"So what's next?" Raven turned to her, and managed her first good smile, which Alane mirrored, mixing in assurance. The pained, headache-like look on the reshelled woman's face had vanished.

"How about you start by wiggling your toes?", she suggested. Raven glanced over to the Major. "And you do it at your pace, dear. You have nothing to prove here, and Aetheis isn't watching either."

 _Shit. Am I really this readable?_

Alane saw the activity on the neurotelemetrics, and guessed from the firing brain centers. "A bit, my dear, but then I know some things that might be important here." Her smile was calming and sweet, trustful, and neuro-engineered perfectly that way. Raven relaxed and did as indicated, slowly wiggling her toes, getting a feeling for new feet that were more graceful than her old feet, though they still offered enough grip for complex maneuvering, kicks, and general stability, which they'd need for the louder, less recreational part of the upcoming evening.

After that, Alane asked her to lay back, and raise her legs one after another, bending them, stretching them, riding a bicycle in the air, and thoroughly rotating all of the joints, testing out the enhanced motion range compared to human baseline joints, as well as the integrating overstretching protection.

Then it was time to stand up. Raven swung her feet around, and carefully touched the ground with bare feet.

She felt the warm, contoured grip of the rubberized floor, feeling it deform under her feet, the nubs extruding from the flooring poking the soft skin. She wriggled her feet a bit, cherished the feeling and newfound sensitivity.

It felt _great_.

She closed her eyes and sighed, falling into her new skin, emptying her mind and just letting it stream in.

The sound of the air conditioning, ever so faint. The hum of drives, reactors and magnetohydrodynamic generators, the faint dark energy thrum of the mass effect fields that pulled them down and forward, creating paragravity and canceling out the acceleration of the engines, in her eezo nodules. The warmth of the directed IR from the lambs, and the beeping and humming of medical instruments.

She snapped back into reality when one of the medical techs pulled cables from her back, removing the power, fluid and data connections she only now realized had been there. Then the tech pulled away the data connectors for the one-piece resleeving suit she still wore, and nodded to Doctor Alane.

"Stand right up, then. Again, take it slow. Your center of mass is different now, so keep that in mind. Also, you have longer limbs- so keep that in mind as you stand up."

"Thanks Doc. I think I'm starting to have it under contro _ooo-_ ", Raven felt as though she her attempt to stand was sending her shooting into the air, and she slowed down as a slight vertigo manifested itself. A soft hand snapped out and steadied her as she wavered.

"Not", Raven concluded.

Alane cracked a smile. "You're coming into it." As she said so, another two blips on the HUD turned from red to orange and quickly onwards to green. Ghost and Shell were coming into symphony, not just reconciliation, the resleeving shock receding.

"Now. Raise your arms, and tilt to the left and the right."

Raven did as indicated, slowly, still breaking into phases of wavering uncertainty from time to time.

"Good. Now, arms front, stretched away, and slowly bow down…."

Raven started bowing down, working her back muscles as she dropped.

"...and reach for your toes. Stretch slowly. Give the muscles a bit of time."

Alane watched Raven until finally, her wavering fingers reached the toes and touched them. She smiled again, voice happy: "That's good. Now hold for a bit, and then come back up."

"Slowly", Raven pre-empted her with a smile.

"Yep." Alane allowed herself to lean back on her feet, minimizing the AROW running the post-reshelling diagnostics with a gesture and wave of a right virtual hand on her dashboard, letting the minimalistic interface run in a corner of her eye.

"And with that… what would you say about some walking?"


	25. Before the Party Part 3-2

Three beautiful women preparing for a social evening event on Bekenstein would normally begin their extensive preparations in a walk-in wardrobe built from dark, exotic wood, with fluffy carpeting and toned glass, illuminated by complex OLED installations, carefully selecting the custom-cut costumes or dresses from the automated wardrobe system.

For Motoko Kusanagi, Raven and Aetheis T'Lairo, the process started with the selection of their weapons, and the preparation room they had for themselves was far less fanciful - textured, warm rubber flooring and simplistic grey-pallet composite polymers. The wardrobes were still automated, as was the armory that occupied the central table.

Aetheis turned the human gun over in her hands, right index finger on the trigger guard, inspecting the receptacles for heatsinks, ammunition block, and power cell. The grip was well-textured and definitely custom-molded; the gun just slipped into the right position as soon as she closed a hand around it.

The weapon had no markings, no serial number; a single QR code, barely visible, that resolved into an anonymous string of numbers when her Inlays riding on the eyes projected an entoptic AR tag over the code. They also identified the gun: an M85C8 "Disposable", Intelligence Service standard for covert operations, scrubbed of ID markings and calibrated as to merge into a massive amalgamation of near-identical weapons. Loaded with the match grade ammo blocks that still lay on the table in their sealed plastic boxes, any attempt to track field print, ablation burn-off, muzzle properties or gun internals to a specific weapon would fail thoroughly. The flechettes would leave no residue; mostly made of synthetic diamond printed en-masse in some massive wet carbon organizer line that produced them by the millions per day, their high-hypersonic terminal impact would liquify the rounds. Tracking of atomic residue based of modern MRI transopter techniques would only reveal the projectiles had been scrubbed to avoid identification - there would be no molecular stamp of special isotopes to make an ID with the ammo block supplier.

Inserting a power cell into the gun, Aetheis decided that it would do for the evening. She scratched the base of her skull with the left while the gun booted and connected through the NFC array nanogrown into her true skin. The masking skin had finally stopped prickling in most places, especially the more sensitive areas of the soles, hands, breasts and butt, and her mouth didn't taste of the wet nanomasking swarm anymore that would scrub her mouth of any traitorous SLNA, but there were still rough spots.

Considering that both transhumans still looked a bit hungover and moved especially carefully when doing anything delicate, and Raven had been working isometric exercises well until Aetheis had recovered from her own operation, her fuzzing about the masking skin had gained a new perspective however. And one should think that after a century running around with this tech I could become used to it, she chided herself.

She looked at Kusanagi. The woman had definitely the most in- what could you even call this. Inhumane? -inhumane body of the three, with a milky blue-violet skin and striking eyes, contrasting with long, braided hair that came in black with strands of red-blonde and a dark crimson red, silver tips mixing into complete the contrast of colors.

She also had far more extensive skinlights, forming complex patterns in between her eyebrows, down her nose, and on her shoulders and arms; a selection of tattoos on cheeks, neck, back and lower arms served to further enhance the contrast. Her PAVI drew entoptic explanations over the various motives realized in light and pigment - they sourced primarily from mongolian and arabian culture, with some indian influence, and had been adopted by various mercenary groups and other elements of violence over the years. The charged meaning was clear - Miss Saya Kameito was a serious adversary, and had the actions to her name.

The Asari finished checking her disposable and handed it to Kusanagi, holding it by the top, grip forward.

"Thanks. You should get your _Sequalla'shar_." Her pale hand grabbed the weapon, collapsed it with a trained motion that allowed to the grip to compact without squashing her fingers, then slotted it into the compartment that had extended from her left upper leg, where it came to rest inside the catomic smart matter that held equipment inside the polymer-sealed bay. The smart material moulded itself around the compact block of the gun.

At the same time, Raven was stuffing the flat disks of quarian-made recon drones into her own compartments, joining another pistol and a large block of Thermex in the other, combined with a set of small, stubby detonators. The small heatsink bundles she slotted into another compartment in both of her arms.

Aetheis approached the one case no-one had opened so far. It was an asari weapons case, made entirely from sealed glass-like ceramics. The primary color was a bright creamy white, accented with strips of dark violet and areas of black. Fine, glassy runes artfully molded with curved patterns had been meticulously engraved into the colored areas, and an artisan painting had been placed, in stylistic brush lines, on the center of the case.

She pressed both of her thumbs into the depression, waited while the system scanned her SLNA and fingerprint, lasers racing across the miniscule ridges of the soft, micro-scaled skin. She waited for the tug at her _Shazsi_ , and answered with the sequence of _impre'saiei_.

 _A monastery in the mountains, surrounded by ceramic walls. A courtyard of fine gravel and shivisar mattes, asari of young ages training in well-circled motions with artisan training weapons._

 _A city of twisting spires of colorful glass and low-slung white buildings, marred by fire and smoke. Skimmers and VTOLs howl overhead, as a SRV descends as a screaming meteor and rips a position beyond the horizon to shreds._

 _The pain of shattered legs, the tissue burn of a warp, the flittering teeth of awareness in shock._

 _A desolate, sun-burned wasteland, the push and pull of the battlesuit, sophonts in the distance, firing back. Beyond them, a massive crashed craft, more than a kilometer in length, its organic-looking structures exposed to the thin argon atmosphere._

The case returns a single, short _impre'saie_ : _Compliance_.

The locks clicked open without a sound, and Aetheis slowly lifted the lid of the case, exposing its contents.

The case had two trays for holding her personal collection of commando swords and knives, forged over three centuries by a selection of trusted artisans and weapon smiths for her personal use. Her personal _Sequalla'zan_ sword occupied the center of the case, long, slightly bend and black as darkness itself, it's 1 ½ handle a similar dark grey textured with modern materials, and sized for use with hardsuit gloves. A set of separate grips, including one for battlesuit use, were stowed away next to it.

Her attention was focused on the _Sequalla'shar_ rested inside the upper trey. It was a short blade, 35 centimeters in length excluding the grip, with one straight edge and a sharp, angled tip, inside a black SmartPack sheath that would attach anywhere on an enabled surface. Carefully she undid the dark violet lashes that held the sword and sheath in place and lifted it out of the fractal-sintered flexible plastic, and lifted it into the air, slowly and appraisingly.

Raven watched her with her new eyes, stark blue irises as the asari almost referentially, in slow and circled motions, checked the Sequalla'shar, then grabbed it by the sheath and grip and carefully drew the actual short sword. The sheath didn't make a sound as slowly and steadily, the blade slid out of the ceramic-polymer sheath that had held it, its edge a matte silverish grey with a black body, contrasted with a single white line that traced the entire length of the blade from the sides of the grip over the entirely white sides of the guard to the sharp point of the blade. Minimal flowery patterns of contrast chased across the cheeks, and a single set of Asari High _Tessia'lia_ runes was engraved at the base of the spine, extending from the guard.

With a flare of biotic power, Aetheis reached out and found the core of the blade, waveguides and reinforcement components thrumming with dark energy as she feed them, charging the core. The edge of the blade ignited with a blue-white fire as the warp field manifested, interference wave fractals of blue-violet photon fields running across the blade and cheeks like unfire.

With a satisfied nod, the asari stopped feeding the warp core, and smoothly slid the blade back into its sheath before turning and depressing a section on the hilt. Something clicked inside the blade, and with a fluid motion, Aetheis flipped the grip around, revealing a bundling network of microscopic tubes that smoothly extruded and bend, keeping the blade and resonator core connected with the grip while reducing the length of the whole Sequalla'shar far enough to store it inside Kusanagi's left leg compartment.

She handed Kusanagi the blade by the sheath, and the transhuman took it, eyed it for a moment, then slowly lowered it into her left leg compartment without another comment, waiting for a moment before nodding. "It fits."

Aetheis allowed a small breath to escape. "Good."

The leg compartment closed without another sound, smoothly melding with the surrounding skin. Nothing was there to indicate both transhumans now carried a small arsenal in their arms and legs.

Not to speak of any other capabilities. Whomever got in their way was in for a bad, bad time.

"So…", Raven looked around. "Clothing?"

Aetheis snorted involuntary at the situation. So far they had indeed worn only their underwear for the evening. She giving an asari shrug in response: "Is that a human thing?"

Raven snapped a hand before her mouth, then started giggling. "...Yes", she managed to press out. "Not for you?"

"Only when we feel like it", Aetheis managed before she completely lost it over the statement.

It felt good, laughing together. After a moment, Kusanagi joined in as well, stopping when Raven finally managed to catch her breath, one hand on her chest. "Oh my."

She laughed again, and Aetheis leaned against the table.

This time, Kusanagi simply looked at them and waited. "Clothing."

"Right". Raven snapped to attention for a moment, then stepped towards a wardrobe that was spitting out three separate undersuits. Another one was presenting their clothing for the evening, three separate fashionable dresses that had also been delivered with the special mission package.

"These undersuits are a pretty common choice for self-defense, all around. Nobody will bat an eyelash at us wearing this, moreso given it's skin-mimetic."

"Anything special?", Aetheis asked as she laid out the suit on a bench and zipped the thick clothing open.

"Standard armaweave and an integrated thermoptic camouflage. That's about it."

"About it?", Aetheis asked, raising a not-eyebrow in imitation of the human motion.

"Internal networking. But not much, it's limited by power. The only other thing is SmartPack-enabling and grip enhancement."

Aetheis nodded and closed the suit up. The grey, scale-like material flowed and began imitating her skin and underwear, as promised. "Huh. Neat."

Kusanagi closed up her own suit, then grabbed two of the hangers off the robotic wardrobe. One of them was Aetheis' costume; it covered her torso and back fully, not leaving enough space for a full hand to touch her anywhere; a set of tight trousers exposing part of her legs was supplemented by a set of draping clothing.

By contrast, the two transhuman dresses were cut exposing, leaving skin on the chest and back open to the air, and both had skirts.

 _Weird, humans thinking that women's dresses should often include skirts. We don't deal nearly as much in this kind of clothing, and like this._

She grabbed the Tiara that came with the dress and began working its clips into her Thishara. The clips were mostly silver with three bronze highlights across the orbit of her head, at both sides and in the center. The center image, created on a small piece of smart-cloth, was the Asari huntress goddess Kurinth.

She turned around and found one of the wardrobes had already configured into a mirror. Slowly she checked the seating of the Tiara, then attached the small, discreet headset to her right side again, where it attached to the masking skin and spread its audio membrane over her auditory membranes. A small chime signaled her the headset had connected properly.

"Ready to go?", Raven asked, shifting around on her slippers, the pair of high heels in one hand.

"Let's go. We've got an appointment to keep after all."

Aetheris smiled. It wasn't a nice one. She was going to enjoy this evening twice over.

* * *

CULTURE / ASARI  
 **ASARI CLOTHING ETHICS**

Contrary to common galactic perception especially among transhumans, the asari culture doesn't embrace revealing clothing styles at its foundation. Indeed, archeology reveals that the asari embraced fully covering clothes as early as able, and even today correct clothing that covers most of the body, especially the arms and back, is a core of asari social etiquette.

The reason for this is the asari capability to meld with themselves primarily. While this capability has a "bandwith" definable through the amount of skin-to-skin contact, a hand-on-back contact for example is sufficient to initiate deep melds by forced nature and attempt to overwhelm the other party's nervous system. Especially prehistoric asari are suspected to have used this capability from time to time to disable rivals or otherwise conduct "meld engineering". In consequence, unless an asari wants to meld, they tend to wear fully covering clothing, leaving no skin open and ensuring no meld can be created.

Small areas of exposed skin (mostly thin strips) or tightly cut clothing are less of a problem, and commonly accepted; in the same manner coloring and cuts are used to suggest skin exposure, and modern asari smart clothing also works with non-conductive retransmission materials - The basic cultural inertia however, remains.

Asari only wear revealing clothing when they are in search of a partner or an other deep engagement; they have also developed a set of symbolics and pieces of clothing to signal readiness to observant people in their surrounding without wearing such clothing in the open. This is connected to the asari's trust level of her environment - Even though asari are, by other species standards, very ready to meld and engage in sexual activity, any kind of meld is a serious business - Bidirectional mental exposure to each other is a moment of unblemished truth, and unlike more moderated synthetic formats, far less controlled or controllable. As such, at least a basic level of trust must be in existence before an asari considers any deep form of meld.

Since transhumanity has joined the galactic scene, these barriers have begun dissolving slowly but steadily; many asari maidens have far more willingly adopted transhuman clothing styles for women in the past two decades, especially when in transhuman company, imitating the more casually sexual nature of human clothing and social interaction.


	26. Before the Party Pt 4

_Finally. Finally, finally, finally. Finally I get to work with a real transhuman in the digital realm, with their tech, their software and their AIs. Not just handouts and salvage and last generations. Bleeding_ kalesai _edge._

The CIC of the SSV Fujibayashi Nagato was a dark place mostly lit by the orange-red trigraphic displays and holographic screens of the individual consoles, and some minimal OLED strips under the ceiling.

For Voto'Leelas, it was covered in information layered over a perfect daylight illumination. Quarians lived immersed in information as soon as the lid of the envirosuit closed itself over their faces; at an age where Citadel sophonts still struggled with carefully VI-modulated Augmented Reality Overlays, 'Leelas and his peers had learned to filter through the slew of information their VI swarms could project onto visors and feed to implants.

The semi-intelligent applications analyzed and identified hardware, the contents of the screens and what programs created them, tracked emotional activity and topological metrics; others dug into the interceptable wireless traffic, drawing lines of communication, standards of encryption, communication activity, and what snippets of information could be cracked by the Distributed Processing Environment that was laced into the Envirosuit and inside his own body.

Right now, the CIC was understaffed, many of the consoles operating in some form of automated mode, clearly showing activity but no obvious manipulator.

'Leelas leaned out and looked at Ishikawa. The transhuman had his back turned to Voto'Leelas console that ran along the rim of the CIC, standing at the edge of the main holotank and silently talking with someone's projection in it. The orange trigraphic light played at the edges of the man's hair and beard. His mouth wasn't moving, and the directional microphones of 'Leelas suit did not pick up any sound, but the person at the other end was talking; reconstructive imaging of the obscured trigraph showed as much.

So he leaned back on his seat and waited. Setting up a basic graphic interface had taken him less than 5 minutes of scrolling through the selection of software and handing one of the AIs by the name of "Athena" a set of preferences. The Synthetic Intellect had quickly and efficiently set up the console for him, then signed off, apparently not registering his interest in it.

A shame, to be true. As a quarian, even among the sympathetic streams of the fleet, he had never even come close to an AI. The autocensor VIs were always hunting for "impurities" on his old Task Force's traffic - even so, what were the chances he actually got an AI interested in any kind of communication with him? Quarians had shunned them, and were shunned in turn. When the hallmark of your civilization, of your entire _species_ , was a public hate of AIs, how were you going to erase the spite, the threat messages, the public Council forum break between the transhuman ambassador and their AI compatriots and a quarian High Admiral? The cyberattacks, the data bombings, radicals hacking, burning and blowing up AI chassis in the streets of Citadel planets ever so often the two rare kinds crossed?

 _The unfortunate answer is… you don't. Not unless you have the cred, as the humans say. And that takes time. Effort. Investment. Socializing. And getting on the radar of certain sophonts._

[ _You are worrying too much. I am sure it will work out._ ] Selai said in his mind.

 _Thanks, but what are the chances?_

[ _Pretty good, actually_.] The VI entity dumped the cache of a probability matrix into his Exocortex; the tree of percentages and events unfolded in both his vision and his cortex, invisible points of knowledge attached to voxels of light.  
 _  
Always one to cheer me up with statistics?_ There was a phantom tingle of amusement from the NVI cluster.

[ _Yes. Have fun._ ]

He saw Ishikawa turn around and approach in his perimeter vision, virtual eyes swinging around to track him through the microcamera array that ran, in a fat strip, around the sides and back of his helmet. Next to 'Leelas, the seat elevated and turned itself around, standing up to let Ishikawa sit down comfortably.

"Alright, you're configured," Ishikawa said as the chair rotated back around and lowered itself into work position, "so let's get this party started."

"Yes sir."

"Athena, go live on the virtual environment." Ishikawa's fingers chased and taped through the trigraphic conole, opening programs and selecting options with experience. Internally, unheard to the quarian, Ishikawa turned to his muse: [Ayjas, set up the rest of the environment, please.] He keyed in everyone on the cyberwarfare operators list, and opened a Direct Group Channel: [All Cyberwarfare crews for OP MYSTERY DANCE, to stations. We're going live with pre-Ops for Phase I in five minutes, mark.]

 _[Sir.]_

"So, you said you've done this before?"

"...Somewhat," 'Leelas explained. I suspect the set-up here will be a bit better than what I could get my hands on."

"Damn right you are, it's better. Up front, you have full systems clearance; but Athena has a few routines on you, so please do not try anything for the sake of The Game, okay?". A hand landed on 'Leelas shoulders, affectionate but warning.

"Yes sir."

"Right, pal. Second warning, you've seen the specs. The low latency on the environment can take inexperienced operators by surprise, so take it slow and ease into it. Give your DNI and wetware time to catch up with the new data formats and streaming. I assume you know the rest?"

"Don't go in too deep too fast, do not multithread at the beginning, so not effect with more than two taskings at a time, keep a high level of abstraction", 'Leelas recited down.

Ishikawa nodded, the ends of his mouth twitching upwards. "Good. Give Athena… two minutes, then I'll jack you in, okay?"

Around them, the remaining crew in full Shells got into their stations and began setting up; a few allowed the sets of high-bandwidth optical jacks on the end of synth-muscle-sleeved cables to sneak in, find their ports, and carefully insert themselves until they flicked into place, lowering back into the comfortable padding and locking into the semi-rigor mortis of the Links.

On his screen, Voto'Leelas watched as the virtual operations environment seeded itself component by component, networking together into an ever-growing complex spiderweb of components communicating by way of colorful connections of light, being hosted on the massive selection of dedicated processor units buried inside a server room somewhere aft, closer to engineering.

The SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ had space to spare as a full-blown Cruiser - at 620 meters, but without the need to transport battalions of Espatier Operation Forces and their thousands of tons of gear, a good amount of her space had been dedicated to processors and the infrastructure required to keep them cool and shielded in the challenging environment of space.

A lot of the processing power came from conventional processors - superstacked 2nm binary processor CPUs, a set of massive 4-meter spheres of super-chilled nano-gel processors capable of reorganizing themselves into dedicated logic structures as required by their process load, and optical UV computer, drawing upon regular non-volatile RAM, DNA solution and storage crystal to store their data. A set of dedicated Neural Processing Units and attached servers housed the _Fujibayashi Nagato_ 's dedicated support element of AIs.

The core and pride however were the big quantum computer arrays, wrapped in meters of dedicated decoherence shielding, used for brute-force computing and cracking of even the hardest encryption patterns, as well as running a selection of AI routines that would have never run as efficient on the normal, synthetic neuron-based NPUs.

The processing load on all of these systems was rising as Athena and her pantheon of sub-AIs, LAIs and citadel-supplied VIs began configuring the massive virtual space and loaded one set of programs, libraries, software suites and dedicated AI instances after another, and prepared it for the insertion of the transhuman operators.

Between Voto'Leelas and Ishikawa, a transhuman male in a normal shipsuit materialized as an ARvatar: "We're ready for jack-in", Abdul-Karim Khoury reported. He turned to Voto'Leelas: "We're going to take it a bit slower with the throttle-up, as with normal exposure procedure. If you'd open your ports, please?"

Voto'leelas tensed the pseudo-muscles at his back, and felt the protective hatches over his set of standard cybernetic interface ports slide away.

"Thank you. Setting your connection now."

The first connector slid in and clicked into place, arresting inside the port. All around the face of the cylinder, microscopic laser arrays began pulsing, synchronizing with the receiver elements inside the jack; return signaling came from the similar laser transceiver array inside the jack connector.

Inside Voto'Leelas' dataspace, a short list ran its course as the two transceiver chipsets, one at the base of the connector jacks and one in the communications set inside the couch, arranged details and synchronized for high-speed transmission. After the checklist had passed without faults or time-outs, the connector software proceeded to insert the next jack.

Inside his mind, a new Com channel opened. [Allright, Voto, I'm settling you in now. Jacks 1 and 2 will handle general system ops, and I am opening those up first. This alone can be a lot, so I am trusting you PAVI to handle the clearance load; if it goes too far I will block your access and if necessary eject you from parts of the system.]

On the outside world, only milliseconds had passed as the exchange translated through the DNI, into the corti of the augmented quarian brain, and was distributed. [Understood.]

[Linking you in now.]

As the third jack slid into place-

 _Extension._

The head opens up, the senses of the real world recede and yet stay in place as the scale of the world tips, as perceptions expands.

He falls, and grows.

"Whoah." The vocal folds were so close, the sound they made so far away, over there. Not here, in a world of information and light.

[Seeja nashur vas ashea'selars, Voto'Leelas vas Siav'eris Blade nar Xas'Itan.] _Welcome to the Cybersphere._

[Kai.] _Thank you._

Voto'Leelas was existing in the middle of a sea of information, data, and software, a heavily abstracted world his brain interpreted as knowledge coming from outside of the Core mind as well as visual data. He had hands, effectors, fingers, controls, many of them distant phantoms of existence - There, but only faintly so, not controllable. The command units of the software, ready to accept both contextual, abstract higher-order commands or low-level, almost instinctual control, puppets dancing to a sapients strings.

"Ishikawa, give him a wave please."

A hand passed in front of his visor, and phantom eyes tracked it. ARgraphic tags and entoptic elements attached themselves to it, tracked it, measured it.

"Yes?"

"Good. You still track sidereal too. Focus on the consoles please, and try to use your hand controls."

Voto focused on the screens in front of them. "I don't have to move my head, do I?"

"No. The screens will be used for some operations, but exist mostly to give anyone else overview of your activities at a glance."

[We'll essentially be operating in Vir fully,] Ishikawa joined in, and Voto'leelas turned his virtual body around, seeing the avatar of the transhuman inside the main "layer" of the virtual environment. [For an Operation like this, there are few uses staying sideral.]

[Understood.]

He looked around, tried to seize up the entire space. More and more Avatars were joining in, many of them in the same pseudo-seated position that showed them as jacked-in transhuman personnel. But several others stood or hovered around; one of them was a transhuman woman in white clothing and light bronze armor. The entoptic attachment denoted her as an Avatar of Athena.

He nodded at the Avatar. "Hello again."

She turned to him: "Welcome back."

"Alright people, since everyone is jacked in now", Ishikawa took over, "one final briefing before we begin execution.

"We have three main objectives for today's operation. We need Intel on where NOVUM SPIRITUS is stored - that means cracking the mansion security and reverse-engineering any entries into all three vaults. We will conduct this pre-operation until a deadline of 2000 Hours OPT, after which our other two main objectives come into play - cyber-support for the on-site elements, and keeping the police out of our gig for as long as possible by enforcing a total data quarantine around the OPSite.

"In order to achieve all of these three objectives, we're going to establish a thorough and large-scale cyber support operations over the next hours. We will have uninterrupted tightbeam access to the Bekenstein transorbital infosphere in +15 minutes, and be in a stable parking orbit thirty minutes later; as soon as we get it, we pipe in and secure friendly assets first, then we procure our grey support. By +1 Hour, I want us to have our backbone in place and begin infiltrating the mansions network and the Bekenstein Security Network.

"To be clear, I expect total subversion - by the time MYSTERY DANCE starts, _nothing_ in the digital sphere happens without our consent. I want backdoors into every vital and non-vital system, lockouts on weapons and security, hacks on every single bot on the estate, and quadruple fallback options down to a full 'bomb and crash.

"That all understood? Alright, get set. Op supervision falls down to me, Jakashi and Voto'leelas, almost as usual. Prepare your kit and get set for insertion. It's gonna be a long day, so watch your exertion."

Voto'Leelas called up his own toolkits, and selected some initial applications. "What will be my area of responsibility, Sir?"

"Setting the dataflags on all our assets, including setting up the VPNs and Botnets. We have to look like a joint Citadel Merc group, so I trust you to modify our toolkits and signatures appropriately."

"Can your team deal with the resulting changes to performance and capabilities?"

"I will ensure appropriate exomemory documentation is available," Athena assured him. "We AIs will also handle interfacing to ensure the operators receive appropriate performance for their demands. You have standard VISSD attached to your own tools?`"

"It's modified, but yes, and I imagine you'll have no problem adapting." Virtual hands reached out and pulled the Virtual Intelligence Software Support Data for his kits from his own dataspace, forking a copy to the AI.

"Thanks." The AI went to work analyzing the VISSDs and disseminating new packages to the other infomorphs.

[You'll do well, kid,] Ishikawa send him on a private channel. [I had some time to review your performance, you've got the right mindset if nothing else. Now go enjoy.]

[Oh, Realms _yes_.]

Simple amusement came across the channel in return.

* * *

"How are we looking, Helm?" Captain Kawano Akio leaned back in her seat, looking at the status trigraph that occupied the central space of her personal wrap-around holographic screen. All 620 meters of her cruiser looked green and shiny across the board.

"Coming down into parking orbit now, final circularization burn at apoapsis in T-Minus 15 minutes and counting," Flight Lieutenant Manar Dewitte announced him his station.

"Keep her slow and steady, we're a civilian craft, remember."

"Aye Ma'am."

"Any suspicious chatter?" Akio turned to Kaity Guerra, her trigraphic Avatar hovering to her right.

The Infomorph reached to her right ear for a moment. "Negative Ma'am. SysCon and Traffic are both buying we're not a _New York_ -class Cruiser."

"Good."

For Akio, the deployment had been a nightmare. Recalled to Arcturus on short notice and then forced to fit on the camouflage kits in less than an hour, while having half of her multi-mission space ripped out and replaced. All the meanwhile taking on cargo and refitting for the transport and operational support of Citadel sophonts who themselves brought a good 100 tons of gear and equipment aboard and racked it down as soon as she had space available. Akio and her crew had been pushed to the edge of what was feasible even with AI support and a 75% synthetic crew.

Then a rush up the spinward European arm, from Arcturus out to New Kopenhagen, pushing the aviation eezonics all the way to compensate for the fact they had to run without antimatter or the performance specs of military fusion torches, while troubleshooting complications with the gear and crew transferred aboard, followed by the interstellar intercept with an OSI corvette that had brought aboard a singular Special Mission Package inside its container.

Now it looked like they would finally get some rest, for a few hours at least.

That Flight Officer James Gordon, the Commander Aerospace Group on Shift, was currently busy drumming together two "H-Taavs", their crew and two civilian-looking Aerospace shuttles on the aft right mission flight deck, did not bode well for their chances to stay in orbit for long.

"Guerra, do we finally have an update regarding our orbital deployment time?"

"Only from the Council Spectre, Ma'am, Major Kusanagi still hasn't dropped an answer in the queue."

"Nevermind right now, what does the Spectre say?" Akio grabbed her cup of tea and slurped on the hot liquid.

"Spectre Bau has informed me that we can expect to break orbit as soon as MYSTERY DANCE completes and the team extracts; that would make it at the latest 2030 hours Operations Time."

"So… four hours at best." Akio rubbed a hand across her face.

"See that at least we get the engine maintenance done and spin the core down. I want flight systems back into the upper green if nothing else."

"Yes Ma'am."

The SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ was traveling with her nose pointed retrograde, all four main engines pointed prograde, ready to engage in fifteen minutes.

As a craft designed for extended relativistic flight operations, even underneath all of her hull add-ons, the _Fujibayashi Nagato_ had an excuse for being quasi-aerodynamic. Her hull began with a wide, flat wedge that widened out into the main hull sprouting additional wings, whose in-between space had been filled with simulated cargo racking added onto a general superstructure; mimicking a common construction technique.

The company that constructed the _New York_ -class cruiser spaceframe, New Los Angeles Yards, also used the same superstructure for the construction of a set of freighters; one of which SSV Fujibayashi Nagato was now emulating. Using the same micro-sintered superstructure for a wide selection of actual space frames, from combat craft over freighters, support vehicles, mining craft, and colonial ships, have the New Los Angeles Yards good quality ships from the same production line - a lucrative arrangement all around.

The discrete supporting funds paid by OSI and the SAS that were channeled into New Los Angeles Yard's bank accounts for also providing a convenient platform for disguising a top-of-the-line warships went unmentioned whenever the megacorp pitched to customers.

The outer hull from the engines forward was a shinning standard white, reflective to infrared and visual light alike to help in thermal management and avoid heating by the sun, broken up by standard warnings, poking RCS thrusters and the surface features of civilian barrier generators, whose ID would have denoted the spacecraft as one traveling the inner space routes as they weren't the high-end versions fitted closer to the edges of Council space and increasing pirate activity, and row after row of space doors, hiding additional sensors, robot hotels, airlocks, docking clamps, and transfer connectors, the later for power, water, air, remass and fuel.

200 meters forward, the edge of the central "wings" in between the cargo spaces held a bigger set of space doors, marked with big black letters on both wings: "Parasite Hangar AR2 Launch/Retrieve Airlock 1".

50 meters in, James Gordon was going around, gesturing as he went, shouting instructions: "I want the HTAAVs on the second line, lined up and ready to load. Now, what about the goddamn Ferrari is not working?"

"Boss, we loaded this thing early out of storage. I tell you the avio-'zonics need time to recalibrate after all the fields they've been exposed to, and the fact that we're still in flight isn't helping. Give me 20 and a stationary parking orbit, and I can get this fixed up."

"Goddamn civilian construction and its inability to be transported on a military spacecraft," Gordon muttered under his breath. "Okay, you get your time! But it depends on what the ground team wants, might need to expedite."

"Not burn up on entry interface would be a sure thing they want, I'd hazard."

Gordon snapped off a quick, barking laugh. "Yeah, we can all agree on that."

He turned to his muse: [How the heck do they transport this stuff without re-calibration?]

[Unfortunate incident; we had it lined up on flight deck without its dedicated, synched up rig. That would have reduced pre-flight checks to five minutes.]

[Damn!]

 _That one is on me. I wanted it on the flight deck immediately, and Xaru didn't want to question my orders even though he saw that warning._

Gordon shook his head.

[The other Ground Team?], he asked.

[On their way now, actually.]

[Oh good.]

He turned around and watched one of the turian soldiers brought aboard by the Spectre step off the aft loading ramp of one of their TAV-620 Nacisi, stomping about in his heavy "T-Cas" MPS-1880 Mk.245 _Victarius_ power armor as he headed for another set of weapons and combat webbing he was stowing aboard.

In the back, the other two turians, Batou, Borma Togusa and both a bioroid and an android were talking over a big trigraphic map thrown up by a briefing projector, talking over a trigraph of a massive property dotted with buildings. They talked with low voices, gestured, nodded or shock heads.

"Commanding Officers on Deck!"

Gordon turned around and snapped to attention.

At the far end of the bay, the door to the Internal Transit System dock opened.

Motoko Kusanagi stood at the center, wearing her evening dress with a light jacket over her shoulders for warmth, a pair of light, orange-white high heels in her right hand. Raven and Aetheis T'Lairo stood besides her; all three were unrecognizable without their DisplayID entoptics. Their heights, skin tone, facial features had all changed beyond the known. Spectre Bau stood to the right, wearing his own MX-900RQPP _Kavalas_ power armor sans helmet, in conversation with Kusanagi when the doors opened.

The salarian looked almost comically small inside his massive suit of augmentative armor, wrapped in a thick suit of synthetic muscle underneath heavy composite ceramic plating and shield systems; his normal head poking out of the thick neck of the suit. The composite plating and muscles closed smoothly with his chin. A massive helmet hung from his waist, with the back part that wrapped around the head and up to the horns already attached.

The assault team gathered near the Nacisi TAV watched as their COs stepped onto the deck. Batou let loose a sharp whistle and a nod. "Looking good ladies!" His smile was genuinely friendly, his tone complementary.

"Thanks Batou!", Raven shouted back with her new smoky voice, giving him a wink. "You don't look bad yourself. The metal really stresses your manliness." Her new eyes sparkled.

Togusa gave Batou's armored shoulder a light fistbump as the cyborg crossed his arms. "She's got you there."

Batou laid on his usual lopsided grin and leaned back onto his right leg, relaxed. "Ah."

Bau looked around, stepping towards the Assault Team: "Where are Mr. Vakarian and Mr. Saito?"

"Right here." The two stepped out of the elevator, trailed by a GU android, lugging equipment. Both wore lightweight Recon hardsuits; the linear frames were clearly visible on the outside, the spars and joint motors bulking out under the wide thermoptic camouflage coveralls both had strapped to their armor, hiding away pouches, backpacks and everything else under a grayish textured cloth material that looked and behaved heavily.

The hardsuit helmets were still strapped to their belts, but both Garrus and Saito wore a selection of gear underneath; padded "snoopy caps", in the case of the turian dotted with transcranial inducer hardware and fastened with the helm-internal components of a Sniper Assist System. For Saito, two cables were jacked into now-visible interface points around the orbit of the eye socket, running around his back to another system at the back. Both caps were dotted with harder interface points, gleaming with golden electrodes.

Both stopped near the group, and joined the impromptu circle that had spontaneously formed itself, dropping the cases in their hands; the GU android continued on his way, approaching the second modified Lamborghini sports shuttle tied down on its own slot, opened the right door and began stowing his heavy cases in the back of the vehicle.

There was silence among the group for a moment. In the background, the hangar crews continued their exchanges over the sounds of a starship in motion, and heavy parasite craft preparing for motion.

There was a slight jolt pushing them all to the aft end of the hangar, and in the distance they could hear the fusion engines roaring to life, mixing with the shrill of turbo-pumps and the faint feeling of flight eezonics ramping up, resonating in eezo nodules.

Bau coughed slightly: "So, I suppose I will start this."

He fell silent for a moment.

"This is our first field operation together. We're all professionals, so I will not waste words on bravery, duty, or concentration. I trust you all to do your jobs to the best of your abilities, and excel today.

"We should see this as an opportunity to show each other we can work together. What we do today is, like our first meeting and joint work, a groundbreaking milestone. Never before have our people stood, worked and fought as close together as we will; today we decide about an important step in our cooperation."

Kusanagi took the moment to take over: "I am painfully aware that there is an element of mistrust. But this fight tonight knows no sides among us. It is us against those who wish to do all of us harm. With this operation, and the ones following it, we secure a better place for all of our people, politics and futures."

The two commanders lapsed into silence.

Togusa surprised everyone when he spoke up. "For three decades, people on all sides have insisted that we cannot… will _not_ cooperate, ever. We locked ourselves up inside our own fortresses, spoke with each other over raised guns, broke apart over the smallest issue even as we tried reconciliation and understanding."

The man looked up, and made eye contact with everyone. "Today we decide… whether those naysayers have been right, or wrong all along. And I say they were _wrong_."

"So do I." Kamius Vasalis joined in, pumping a right hand against her armored chest.

"And I." Borma stepped forward.

"And me."

"They have always been wrong." Kusanagi affirmed.

Bau nodded: "And as such… let's go together, today and tomorrow. Good luck everyone, and godspeed. May we turn the wheels in our favor."

Spontaneously, everyone echoed his final words: " **May we turns the wheels in our favor**."

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** Sorry it took so long to finish this; RL life has been busy sqeezing my writing time down to a minimum as of late.

Now, finally... it is time for a party.

Feel free to like, comment and discuss!


	27. Mystery Dance Pt 1

_"_ _Guard yourself from lying; there is he who deceives and there is he who is deceived."_  
 **\- Sextus Empiricus, ancient philosopher**

* * *

 **[SAIN\\\MIN\\\IV/OUN\\\s9\\\opfeed\connecting...]  
[ ****May 20th, 2232** **17:19:06** **Local ]** **  
** **[** ** _Nouveau Venise_** **Region | Bekenstein | Boltzmann | European Arm | Transhuman colonial space ]  
[ Operation ****MYSTERY DANCE** **]** **  
** **[ Mission Objective:** **Semi-covert Black Ops Data Interception and Extraction, Intel Extraction** **]** **  
** **[ Operation Status:** **Live** **]** **  
** **  
[ JTF OPTEAM** ** _HELIADES_** **\- Connecting... ]**

For centuries, spacecraft had returned to planetary atmospheres in fire, their hulls slamming into seemingly static air, wreathing themselves in the plasma of broken atmosphere and ablated heat shielding as they shed their massive orbital speed in turn.

Even in the 2230s, many still did so for simple efficiency, powering down into the atmosphere on transorbital velocities, held on trajectory by engine power and ballistics, seeking the fast, brute-force way into the atmosphere.

The Ferrari _Solestile_ had none of that. It entered with _style_.

The field technology it used had originally been developed by the military for use in stealthy atmospheric entry. A massive dark energy field reached out, "lubricated" the near-static air by decreasing its mass, then pushed it apart on a pseudo-solid surface of a kinetic barrier, guiding it around the actual airframe of the vehicle, then allowing it to smoothly flow back together at the back _,_ with minimal ionization the entire way. Orbital velocity was reduced by way of thrusters.

The interior cabin of the _Solestile_ was almost entirely pseudo-transparent to the outside world; a solid window of c-allotrope sapphire glass stretched across the front and ceiling until it reached the back. Segmented windows covered the sides and were set into the pressure doors of the shuttle, smoothly fusing with the holographic screens that covered the necessary vacuum seals and framework.

Sitting inside the center cabin, Raven and Aetheis on the passenger seat and Kusanagi behind the central pilot console, all three had a great view of the outside world, watching the ball below turn into a bend horizon, the blackness of space mixed with the reflective white of spacecraft, space stations and satellites fading away into a dark blue, heading further downwards into the clouds and a straightening horizon line.

The engines roared at the back as they worked, turbo-pumps working as they substituted still-lacking atmosphere with slush hydrogen. The soundscape was tuned just right - the hum of capacitors and transformer elements that fed the aviation eezonics, the thrum of the cryogenics and pumps, just enough feedback from the plasma engine's magnetic confinement and hydrodynamic propulsion elements to transport their power to the occupants.

Similarly, the _Solestile_ had no holographic flight interface; outside of a few performance values that hovered thickly written just beyond the window, the HUD was provided by an isolated ARONet, giving the best possible view (if the least accessibility to the interface during an emergency.)

The last anachronism was the existence of solid, artistically molded hand controls instead of trigraphic haptics; Kusanagi's new long, pale fingers were wrapped around the glossy black plastic-and-dark wood HOTAS controls, bringing them down calmly and with just enough edge to actually use the luxury sport shuttle she piloted.

Inside her mind, the Matroshka puppet of the Personality 'flage was working the vehicle. At the very Center, the Ghost and Ego of Motoko Kusanagi were the puppet masters, reaching into the interpretative abstract strings of Saya Kameito, AIS Personality Construct 4500-096-5233, who interpreted the intentions of its controller intelligence and ran them through the mask of its personality - in turn advising the Skill AI that actually managed the controls of the Ferrari.

Internally, Motoko had to admit she was still slightly uncomfortable with the entire activity; the set-up created a feeling of naturality in movements and actions that were, on an intellectual level, foreign; on the other hand the system had extremely alleviated the alienation of the new shell, and introduced a familiarity in movement that went beyond synergistic skill of general shell use. She was... lived in.

She _was_ Saya Kameito. And Motoko Kusanagi would only be a higher director for the upcoming hours.

With a precise, elegant press of a button she configured the _Solestile_ into atmospheric flight geometry, deploying the forward-angled winglets and fanning out the high-performance vector-thrust engine pods, and dove down onto the glittering waters of _Nouveau Venise_.

Below them, white yachts with massive, elaborate sails and masts crossed the water, mixing with hydrojets and -boats, low-flying aircars, and free-floating housing complexes that rimmed the oceans around _Nouveau Venise_ \- the city itself build on a natural reef, a gleaming amalgamation of bricks, metal and glass that was spreading across the waves. A few low-slung skyscrapers sprung up from the center of the city, mixing with the periodic towers; the rest was low, four floors at most, spreading onto surface instead of into a volume.

Saya Kameito smoothly took the _Solestile_ into a hard bank to right, screaming across the glittering waters at 600 kilometers per hour and setting the course for the green shorelines. Ahead, the first mansions became visible on the gentle hills, a wide mixing of styles. Many followed the Neo-Italian direction, with a few oddballs of other styles visible among the terrace work, trees and lawns.

The shuttle ordered into the outer air lanes of _Nouveau Venise_ and angled back around; Kusanagi released the controls and leaned back.

"At this point we're back on auto-drive. 6 more minutes to the estate."

She took a breath and looked to both. "Button up… Olympus, this is Heliades Actual, communications and status check."

Cochlear implants and audio-DNIs pulsed into nerves: [Heliades, this is Olympus, communications check is 5 by 5, good encrypt, good packaging. Your datafeed is authenticated and secure, will update if status changes.] The voice cut out for a moment.

[Status advice from Olympus - Hermes is deployed successfully, all assets secure and in position. Ares has made successful interface and will be on ready-standby in ETA 10 minutes. MYSTERY DANCE is a go from Olympus.]

[Understood. Prepare the Situation Feeds and go live on the guardian angels. Heliades-1 is committing.]

Underneath them, water changed to land and lawn; the aircar began descending, locking in the roads between the estates designed to channel air traffic out of the sky of the luxury mansions.

[2, committing.]

Aetheis took a small breath, held it, and released it, slowly exhaling. _~3, committing.~_

[Understood. OP MYSTERY DANCE is transitioning to all-active at 1730 Hours OPT, entering Phase 2 "Infiltration" on planned schedule. Switching you to your operators now.]

In the tops of their vision, new audio connections flickered to life. One was for their assigned remote operators, joining the AIs they carried with themselves; in Aetheis' case, inside a discretely hidden-away headset around her ear. The thought of the limited-purview intelligence riding in some processor around her ear, watching and advising her made Aetheis stomach churn slightly.

Hearing Voto'Leelas' voice, filtered and slightly synthetic, helped more than she was ready to admit: [Heliades, this is Hermes-4 with your situation brief. Good news is that you're entering close to our predicted sweetspot - just enough people that Adriens won't spend much time with you. There are no "hot" persons within close proximity of the driveway, we advise you move internal soon-ish and keep the mercenary contacts for later; your cover personas are known to take their time to recon the locale before they join the social festivities, so do your sweep and get eyes-on. Individual targets will be assigned as the evening develops.]

 _~And you have completely deployed?~_ Aethes queried.

[Affirm, Heliades-3. We got eyes, ears and backdoors. Speaking of which, Heliades-1, here's another package for insertion by the garage backdoor.]

Kusanagi watched the package download and immediately delegated it for integration: [Received and loaded, Hermes-4, thanks.]

[3 minutes. Good luck.]

The shuttle, now in hover car mode, wings and canards retracted and running on the eezonic repulsor drive, wormed its way up the hills.

On the right, the estate gate came up, and they slowed down. Saya Kameito's muse send out a ping, and received a reply; a moment later a hard active scan slid across the Ferrari, setting off the occupants ECM systems.

Aetheis forced herself to relax as Raven thumbed down on her own adrenaline rush through her implants; the masking skin removed any signs of obvious nervousness of biometric changes from the former. Kameito remained stone-cold, staring at one of the four guard mechs, bulky red robots with thick armor plating, watching the shuttle with mechanical sensor strips, a bulky volus-built assault rifle shouldered in its thick arms.

" _Good evening, Miss Kameito. Please wait for security check_." The voice coming over the general area channel was male and utterly professional. An Infomorph, most likely the single sapient controller that supervised this part of the perimeter.

" _First check is clear. You may enter the property. Please drive through the scanner pylons_ slowly."

Kameito nodded, and inched the shuttle through the rapidly opening doors, and up the initial flat driveway flanked by artistically masked scanner arcs. The ECM suite continued to beep in the backs of their heads, and Aetheis couldn't keep herself from watching out through the window. The metamaterials and active elements woven into their bodies and masking skin should trick the scanners from seeing any of the internal items, but even then…

As they passed through the third scanner arc, a set of terahertz scanners managed to acquire a momentary snapshot of a holographic artefact seam underneath Saya Kameito's skin. The security AI registered the anomaly.

27,000 kilometers away, Ishikawa watched as their subversive routines jumped into action for a single moment. The sensor data renders were grabbed and discretely edited away by a swarm of ready-reaction VIs and their subordinate software inserted into the render and analytics software; a logic worm kept the security AI from actually becoming truly aware of the anomalous pick-up, and a moment later a thousand discreet rollbacks from a separate cache eliminated any neurological left-overs from the moment of recognition.

The human infomorph that was supervising the gate visits never saw the momentary anomaly, and Ishikawa had no need to trigger the metaphorical selection of guns he had ready to fire off at the digital entity.

The two heavy anti-armor sentry guns hidden away inside their catomic marble block shrouds never fired. If they had tried to do so, the firing command bypassing the dozen of cut-off and interceptor programs hidden away in the local datasphere, another set of packages would have wiped the units sequencing coding, reset the IFF controls, and locked out the turret motor controls.

The shuttle passed all of the sensor arcs and the two marble blocks that weren't actual marble blocks, and passed a low-slung guard building. A humanoid shape in a medium hardsuit was standing there, a remote avatar for the Infomorph supervisor. Kusanagi stopped the vehicle. "You are clear Ma'am. Enjoy the evening."

Without another word, Saya Kameito hit the gas, and let the shuttle scoot up the hill, leaving the Avatar behind.

 **=[ Chapter 7 - Mystery Dance ]=**  
-| May 20th, 2232 |-

 **[ JTF OPTEAM** **ARTEMIS** **\- Connecting... ]**

 _"_ _Up, up, up! To Battlefields beyond."_

" **To Battlefields beyond!** ", Garrus and Saito roared in _keshturieni_ , in tune with the song thundering from the stereo of the Bugatti. Saito casually gripped the steering horns and laid the aircar into the curve, drifting slightly off the low-slung road, the shadows of passing trees flickering through the glassed driver's compartment.

The engine roared in the background, and Saito pushed the gas at the same time as the bass roared from the speakers, allowing the complex harmonics of turian "war-rock" (as transhumans had come to call the music direction) and its instruments to mesh with the sounds of a sports vehicle at full power.

On the co-pilot seat, Garrus was busy… rocking off, Saito decided for lack of a better qualifier in transhuman languages, in tune with the music.

" _We come to crush, to kill, to bring our enemies to kneel_."

" **To KNEEL!** "

"You know, I'm kinda surprised you're okay with this song," Garrus said out of the blue. "Our soldiers love to use this song to psyche themselves up. Or… are you just pretending?" His voice carried clear over the music, filtered out by the audio gear covering both men's ears.

"Actually, no. I had this a lot during my Merc days; served under a turian for a long time, and he played stuff like this constantly. Tried to psych me out; only managed to make me like it. ENP modding and Skillsofts are a bitch." Saito laughed, eyes glittering with sly humor and an edge of menace. "Then, I pulled out our own songs. "314" and their songs really got him angry. Served that idiot right."

"So… wait a second, you _reprogrammed_ yourself to like it?! Titans, that's fucked up!"

Saito shrugged.

"I was the next-gen Merc. For us, preferences and morality are just another module to plug out and replace as required. Besides, better than to get mad and actually lose my shit. And I could reverse this anytime I like."

"Would you."

Saito shrugged again.

"Do I need to?"

Garrus thought about that for a second. "Still feels kinda fucked up."

"Your opinion, your choice, your experience, your life," Saito concluded. "Nothing's forced on you. I chose that as a way to work with the situation, and it worked. Helped ease the stress with turian mates a lot."

"Everyone gave you a hard shoulder, didn't they?"

"Hmmm. A transhuman biotic with military-grade augmentations, fresh-faced but trained, and just always cool and collected… somehow. And not pretending? Yeah they hated it. I was the collected FNG who wasn't lying, the defying of their upringing."

"Why did you become a mercenary anyway? Last I heard, your Systems Alliance offered big cash for any naturalized biotic."

Saito fell silent.

Garrus looked at him. His PAVI reacted with a small non-verbal read-out appearing in the upper center of his vision, where it commonly rendered on-demand situational cues: _Subject uncomfortable to Saito. Advise not pressing it._

Garrus shrugged and thumped up his personal feed, the sounds of his personal pre-operation playlist thundering in his ears.

Just as he looked back up and out of the window, they began slowing down, and Saito keyed his Com: [Olympus, this is Artemis-Actual, are we clear for insertion?]

After a moment, the answer came back on the same shared channel: [Affirmative Artemis. Go for parking, unpacking and advance of Phaseline Alpha.]

[Check.] Saito turned to Garrus. "Here we go. Get ready."

He slowed the Lamborghini down, eyes flickering across an entoptic map of the local area and any traffic nearby, hovering on the dashboard of the car. Then he hit a virtual switch on his ARO, and the thermoptic camouflage flickered into place, the same moment as the vehicle's transponder and Auto-drive uplink shut down.

Inside the datasphere, a Section 9 AI immediately intervened inside _Nouveau Venise_ Terraces Traffic Control, smoothly editing the new anomaly out of the system and subverting the intelligent VI routines that were the first responders of any problems, constantly hunting the raw data for reports to the stratified, vertical intelligence and decision making hierarchy. Like the gate guard, the sapient operators and system supervisors never even received a hint of abnormal activity inside their system.

Saito smoothly took the shuttle off the road, up the hill and into a small wood, then landed it in the shadow of the trees.

He touched down, and killed the engines, de-activating the power cells and activating the full stealth systems.

They waited for three seconds, as if something or someone would follow them.

"...I think we're clear," Garrus remarked with rasping sarcasm.

"Hmmm." Saito hit the key at his seat that rotated it around to the passenger compartment. Garrus mirrored his action, pulling his feet in as he swung around, legs fitting under the expanding middle console, the crash webbing automatically retracting itself into the rims of the seat.

Their helmets had simply been laid on the central, rubberized floor mat in the center, easily resting there on their seals and neck connectors.

Garrus checked the seating of his skull cap and visor a last time, then reached for the helmet, picking it up carefully in his gloved hands, checking the visor and front side, flipping the armored faceplate up and down, looking and the black-mirrored sapphire glass underneath.

Satisfied, he flipped it over, gave the ports on both sides of the helmet another check as well as running a thumb over the seal running around the whole rim of the helmet's interior. Then, he grabbed it by the front and top, and carefully lifted it over his head, searching for the point where the mechanical points between the helmets back and the lower part already attached to his neck seal and armor caught each other. After the two arrested together, the rest of the armored hardsuit helmet folded down like a lid, finally arresting on the chin armor. There was a faint hiss and pressure as the system pressurized and sealed off.

[ Connecting to Hardsuit DCE and HardComp ++ Initializing Combat Systems ]

The basic layout of the combat HUD loaded into place smoothly, the kinetic barriers running its self-check underneath the navigation compass, the map and radar integrating data and TacNet streams.

The TacNet Squad feed opened and buffered in the upper left corner of the helmet, showing how Saito's system came online in turn as the human sealed his helmet to the hardsuit, and picked up his clip-on gear sections; securing the chest rig full of expendables and some strap-on computer fear, then his backpack and the massive duffle bag at last.

Garrus slung his own, similiar gear, struggling for a moment with properly fitting the backpack onto his hump in the cramped conditions of the low-slung cabin; Saito came to his side, duffle bag pumping into the seats, and helped him guide the connectors together. First the guidance magnets clicked together; then the mechanical connectors arrested. Afterwards, both soldiers checked each other over, ensuring the thermoptic camouflage jackets pulled over everything closed smoothly and seamlessly, less there be a cap in coverage.

"Camo self-test," Saito ordered, activating his. He blurred into semi-transparency, his hard edges dissolving; then he vanished completely. Garrus instinctively hit his chin and mandible controls and switched over to infrared vision; just in time to see his thermal blur be neutralized as well, vanishing into the yellow-green bars of the shuttles beams and the blue-green nature beyond, through the treated windows.

"I'm starting the turn."

Garrus watched for any holes. Just as Saito was turning around, he saw something. "Hold up a second." There was a flickering zone where two parts of thermoptic camouflage clothing had not mated perfectly. He extended his hand, and carefully smoothed across the area. The thermoptic camouflage cloth flickered as it was subjected to the pressure, creating holographic ghosts that seemed to jump away from and dive down into the pseudo-surface of stable nothingness, flickering before dying down as Garrus finished his fix.

The tiny hole in the coverage he had seen, a zone of improper camouflage that would have been caught by image recognition systems, had vanished. "That's better."

Saito waited for a moment. "Oh, you can continue."

There was no other problem with Saito's thermoptics.

Then Garrus kicked in his thermoptic camouflage, and Saito checked him over. "Wait one." Almost immediately the human began tugging and pressing around at Garrus shoulder plating, fuzzing on the connectors between the tactical rig and the chest armor pieces of the hardsuit, then gave him a gentle tug on the shoulder. Garrus continued turning around.

"Stop." Saito tugged somewhere at his backpack for a second.

"Allright, further."

Saito watched his backpack, shifted around the duffle bag for a moment, "...turn further,", then a last tug on the sleeves over the left elbow. "Okay, you're good. Let's get our guns and get ready for ingress."

The transhuman picked both of their guns of the floor, holding Garrus weapon of choise up for him by the top rail, carefully avoiding touching the mounted optics.

Garrus picked the _Varashi_ up by its moulded foregrip and turned it around, working his armored hands into the grip and shouldering it experimentally. At the same time, the Smart link synched, checked the accelerator, power cell and magazine. "50 rounds in the mag, check."

The _Varashi_ -45 was a weapon specifically designed for stealth. There was no way to stealth or otherwise hide a regular high-hypersonic mass driver sabot, both as an audio signature and the signature of the round crashing its way through the atmosphere, creating an obvious trail of ablation, condensed air, and broken atmosphere all the way.

As such, the "V-45" as most simply called it, had made a return to the roots of projectile weapons - Firing heavy-duty flechettes with active compensation guidance through an eezonic gauss accelerator at subsonic speeds. It still packed a similar punch to a normal mass accelerator, if not the same range due to aerodynamic concerns, but it's biggest disadvantage was the need to carry an actual set of magazines with limited ammo.

Only having 300 rounds of additional ammunition stored in pouches all over this armor felt restrictive to say the least. But he still had his trusty Phaeston-C among other toys if things got rough enough to use it.

The Smartlink finished its synch and diagnostics audit, and reported readiness with a cheery bleep. At the same time, the entoptic weapon data activated, showing ammunition, heat levels, signature, target point, distance and status as well as an ARgraphic red laser line from muzzle to the center of the crosshair on his HUD.

Saito had his own human equivalent of the V-45, a heavier Heckler und Koch G-455S, with a longer barrel and heavier accelerator as well as a underslung 2-round seeker launcher and an omni-tool loaded 25mm payload launcher for concussive and knock-out rounds.

They both shouldered their guns, re-activated the thermoptic camouflage including that sprayed onto the weapons, and crouched on both sides of the doors.

[Olympus, Artemis is egressing from infiltration vehicle and proceeding to Phase Line Alpha.]

[Copy all. Good infil], Anathesa Sayas came back to them from orbit.

[Thanks.] Saito's blue-outlined helmet turned to Garrus. [Go.]

Inside his ARO, the transhuman's virtual hand reached out and hit the remote control that unlocked and opened the Lamborghini's left door panels; they unlocked and lifted upwards smooth and fast, the cloaked soldiers stepping out underneath them as soon as possible.

Garrus immediately brought his gun down and checked his surroundings on the left at the same time as Saito did on the right, both men keeping the safeties on and weapon accelerators and caps powered down, fingers well off the triggers; behind them the doors came back down and sealed with a faint click; the shuttle now effectively invisible.

Garrus turned back around and took up the first lead into the forest and up the hill, moving slowly and methodically. His armored and rubberized turian toes easily touched the ground, naturally having a slow, feathering step that easily absorbed his weight and inertia without sound, the rustle of the grass suppressed by the noise cancellation system integrated into his armor.

Around him, leaves were rustling in the warm wind of the Bekenstein northern habitation belt, mediteran birds singing somewhere out of unassisted sight, though not the tracking systems of his armor, drawing yellow-neutral outlines or even simpler position indicator shapes into the surroundings.

Fifty meters up the hills, he took a knee, Saito behind him, and oriented himself. [75 meters to the fence perimeter.]

[Check. Advance 'till waypoint, hold.]

[Stepping off.] Now the advance led down the hill, towards the hexagonal waypoint symbol that hovered in the holographic distance, bringing the weapon up.

[ PAVI, overlay Enemy location feeds. ]

Red diamonds appeared in the distance, behind the tree stems and crowns.

He stepped out behind a tree, and got eyes on the wall.

It was a smooth white, patterned with grey surface etchings of nature motives, the top bending back towards the outside of the wall, three separate rows of NATO wire affixed to it. "Caution: Electricity" were affixed in regular intervals, black panorama sensor spheres hanging from column every 50 meters, clearly structural members of the entire wall.

Garrus took cover behind the tree, easily resting his V45 on the bark, and looked over to Saito's outlined shape next to him. The transhuman was slowly moving his helmet from left to right, seizing up the entire obstacle.

In the distance, the whirr of ducted electro-fans grew louder. [Incoming patrol drone!]

7 seconds later the aerial platform flew by, a squat, roughly triangle-shaped device with an underslung central body housing sensors and a retracted light mass accelerator, spherical sensor units attached to its edges and both ends of the central fuselage.

It passed by without noticing them, advancing and vanishing around the bend of the wall.

[Olympus, are we clear?], Garrus commed.

[Negative, wait another patrol drone, then you will have your window. Get ready for jump.]

He slowly edged away from the tree, eyes jumping between the two sensor spheres that had eyes on the location, lowering the V45 and secured it to his chest rig, well clear of the swinging space of his arms, then tapped on his omnitool for a moment before assuming a sprinter's stance.

At his side, Saito joined him, settling into his own stance.

Another security drone buzzed by.

[Wait… wait… hold… now!]

Garrus broke into a hard sprint, feeling the muscle suit and exoskeleton trigger at full safe strength, pull and push in tune with his own, giving him speed. He took one, two feathering steps, absorbing his weight and inertia, using it to propel himself forward again faster.

Saito took a last step, flexing his knees, before catapulting himself into the air with a barely audible sound of internal components working at strength. He gained vertical momentum as the leg stretched, shooting upwards, 3, 4, 5 meters, in a parabolic trajectory to pass over the tall security wall.

He felt the eezonics inside his armor triggering before its effect set in, the same moment as he flexed his own legs. Garrus' weight decreased to a few hundred realized grams, and the full strength of his legs catapulted his feather-light body into the air, carried him over the wall, and back towards the ground, the eezonics re-establishing his weight for a moment, sending him falling towards the ground.

Moment before impact, they re-engaged a last time, lowering his mass again, and he caught himself stumbling under the momentum gathered during his fall, falling forward and onto his outstretched hands. Saito reached out, hocked a hand underneath his right arm, and pulled him up and forward. [Let's go!]

They ran up the meadow and dove into the cover of the next group of trees and bushes that filled this side of the estate, un-slinging their guns, taking knees and watching every direction.

"Any…", he inhaled deeply, "A-Anything, Olympus?", Garrus asked tersely, not subvocalizing. His sealed helmet would suppress everything up to a scream to the titans without an audible sound.

[...Negative, Artemis, you are in the clear. That was a good jump. Data is edited and drones are still reporting green, no flags or event audits.]

Garrus took another breath. "Spirits Thanks for you guys."

Voto'Leelas voice entered the conversation: [You are welcome, Garrus. Now get moving, Heliades is inbound.]

[Check.] Saito waved Garrus over. [Our spot is up that hill, at the cliff, in the cover of the tree group. We do it as we talked about during the briefing. 10 minutes.]

Garrus set off without another word, taking the lead, scanning for patrols. Red blips of twos, fours and sixes were moving across the estate grounds, patrols locations spliced off from Deep Six Solution's own networks, then forwarded to all Joint Task Force units in the theater. The surveillance of DSS was working against it, allowing the two infiltrators to work their way around the patrols, drones, sensor masts and smart dust swarms monitoring the wide estate around the building complexes.

At one point, they had to hunker down, allowing a patrol of two transhuman officers and their entourage of combat robots to pass by.

"-but yeah, I wish I was posted near the party."

"What, and stand around all the time like a statue, zero media consumption, looking fancy to some corp or other merc big-wig that just thinks you're a small grunt he could have bought of the creché line? No thanks. Out here we have our quiet and nobody's watching my streams."

The other transhuman boxed his partner on the shoulder. "Have you not been paying attention, man? It's a fucking Bekenstein party, with all the ladies in their best dresses. Fuck sitting out here."

"So you just wanna ogle the asari, or what?" The patrol stopped.

[Oh, for fuck's sake], Saito commed. [Move it your sex-obsessed braincases.]Garrus clanced at his HUD clock window.

The guards didn't oblige. "Something wrong with that?", the first one asked.

" _Fuck yeah_ it is! Haven't you been keeping your head on a swivel? They're manipulating _everything_ , and their readiness to get into your head is only so they can mind-rape you, make you someone to support their agenda. They want to subordinate us and then take all of our tech away, that's what they want! We should shoot them, more like!"

"Oh, c'mon, get better feeds on Socials!" The guards moved out of hearing distance.

[ _Really_ professional, those guys], Garrus commed.

[No surprise. Young kids fed on Social, Virs and the thrill of the military.]Saito's feet hit the gravel of the walkway the guards patrolled on, weapon up and pointed after the foot patrol they had just passed.

[...They didn't really sound young, voice-like, Saito] Saito took a knee and allowed Garrus to overtake him.

[By our standards? They are. Immature in mind if nothing else.]

[...You sure you don't have something in common with the Asari?] With Garrus in the cover of the next brush island, Saito followed him into the cover of the plantation.

[Pretty sure I don't, yeah. If my birth shell was blue, I'd know.]

[Not like that.]

But Saito didn't continue the subject, busying himself with opening a large pouch on his backpack and pulling squat crab-like crawlers from it. He pressed the switches on their top that activated them, then threw them on the ground like frisbee disks, where they unfolded and scuttled away into the underbrush, trailing thin fibre-optic cables.

Garrus took that as his cue to disappear into the underbrush, pulling the disks of Anti-Personnel mines and the blocks of heavier claymores from his own pouches. An infomorph activated the Recon swarm seeder strapped to his shoulder at the same time, the module releasing tiny, bionic insects fitted with q-dot camera nano-array swarms, buzzing away into the forest.

The mines were self-installing, burrowing into the ground and hiding themselves with cephaloflage, so after a moment of waiting to see if the diagnostics tripped over any problems, Garrus moved on.

He rendezvoused with Saito was near the sniper site; in the cover of a few more bushes, and in between two serene streams of water. Very natural, Garrus thought. He looked to the west, and the main mansion complex, now clear as day visible with its massive terrace complex up front.

There was activity already, illuminated by the warm light of OLED strips, free-floating robot swarms that danced across the terraces and adjacent lawn, and several fire baskets attended by stylishly designed humanoid droids.

Using his helmet controls, he zoomed in. Automatically his ARO identified people with entoptic tags, overlaid the viewing fields of security cameras, picked out guards and combat mechs that stood in small groups around the perimeter of the event.

The attendants were already chatting in small groups, holding a selection of glasses with beverages, gesturing among themselves. Transhumans were surprisingly only about 50% of the attendants, as far as Garrus could judge; he could make out a lot of turians among the groups, mixing with asari and a minority of salarians and volus.

Saito was pulling a big packet of more thermoptic camouflage clothing from his backpack, spreading it out over the ground. With every fold, its size doubled, showing just how large it was; it comfortably covered 4 square meters of ground.

Then Saito pulled a cable from his pocket, connected it with its counterpart emanating from one edge of the cloth, and connected the two. The thermoptic clothing flickered out of existence, and began to deploy as the polymer bars sewn into it began to unfold and harden.

After 30 seconds, the full thermoptic sniper tent was fully unfolded and ready, and both snipers shed their big duffle bags, carefully shifting them into the tent before they themselves crawled in.

"Pfuh. And 2 minutes to spare. Right on time." Saito shook his helmet and slowly turned around in his arms, until he could reach the pouch where he had stored his trusty SpotterBot and its robotic tripod. He fumbled them out of its pocket, then screwed the tri-pod to the underside.

"Ah snap. Hey Garrus?"

The turian stopped working on his own bag, just about to get his MSR-452 _Iskara_ sniper rifle out of its straps, and turned around slightly. "Yeah?"

"Uh, could you get the fibre-optic hub?" Saito pointed at a second pouch on his tactical rig.

"Whu… oh yeah, one second." Garrus reached in, located the second pouch with a pointer from Saito, and reached in under his arms to retrieve the second piece of equipment. "There you go."

"Thanks. Hold it there for a second…", Saito picked one of the magnetically attached fibre-optic plugs off the hub, extruded a length of reinforced and rubber-mantled cable with a good tug, then plugged it into the side of the SpotterBot before setting it up near the forward edge of the tent, shifting its 'flaged lense front through a slid in the cloth.

Then they unpacked the rest of their gear; infolding bi- and tripods, laying out their two big thermal coolers and hocking up the special interface modules to the rifles own thermal clip ports together with a selection of alternate ammunition blocks for quick loading, and hocking themselves and their gear up with more cables from the fibre-optic hub.

Finally, Saito synched the new network and reported in with Olympus: [Olympus, Artemis, set-up at SP-one. Network check.]

[All good, Artemis, no reds on the board. And just in time. Giving you a ping for Heliades.]

Garrus swung his Iskara around, until his scope laid squarely on the highlight Ferrari _Solestile_ shuttle that scooted up the driveway from the gate, it's driving lights sliding across the evening-lit lawn. [Eyes on. Check.]

He followed the vehicle, then jumped ahead.

[ PAVI, locate Adriens. ]

[ Ping on your HUD. ]

He swung around further, to a human in a finely cut italian party suit highlight by a yellow border and a central diamond of the same color, talking with a group of transhumans that had apparently just arrived. His face was turned away, but Garrus remembered the face well, imprinting it and many others into his mind during the preparation face.

As a sniper, you always knew your targets.

 _One shot… and you'd be history, Adriens._

Wrong, Garrus! He has back-ups. You wouldn't even destroy his stack.

...So I guess for now you will run free, Adriens.

He kept his finger well off the trigger.

"Eyes on Adriens at the stairs, just as expected."

[Heliades arriving.]

* * *

The driveway curved several times coming up to the terrace complex in front of the public mansion place, leading them to drive by the lower terraces and in few of the already present people.

Raven looked out the window, sizing up the scene in real life, banishing the augmentality back into the datasphere. The voxels tracking people all over the estate vanished as well as the analytics, datapoints, destination predictions and biometric analytics, allowing an unobstructed view of suits and dresses, exposed skin, cosmetics biomods, elaborately crafted glassworks and colorful drinks among down-to-earth beverages, and inside it all, the game of social interactions. Talking point, interest, joy; real, faked and controlled, the maneuvering around and to points.

The downloads and augmentations enabled her to understand this dance at a detached level - And tonight she would need it more than anything else.

Her fingers twitched, AIS Personality Construct 4500-096-5234 "Tanja Ijana" overriden for a moment; then Raven slipped back out of her own skin, and Akeiro re-asserted full control.

Raven took a phantom breath, held it, calmed herself. The disconnect was spooky, an almost outside-body experience, and she had never worked with this set-up. She only had her downloads and training virs to call back upon.

Aetheis T'Lairo has it worse though. She has nothing of this. Just old-fashioned pretension, her masking skin, and our people in her ear. None of my advantages.

She felt sorry for… her.

She opened a Private Message, sending only two words. [Good Luck].

The reply came back. [Thanks.]

[You too.]

Their shuttle stopped, and the side doors opened.

Tanja Ijana gathered the clothing of her skirt, smiling, and allowed the seat to swing to the right and lower itself, until she could step easily onto the pavement. A skeletal butler robot reached for her hand, and she took its warm, white-skinned hand as it helped her out. Without wasting a word or glance on it, she stepped up and towards the stairs, turning around to wait for Kameito and T'Salya.

"Ah, welcome, _welcome_!" She turned around, presenting her profile, smiling as the host descended down the marble stairs towards him, hands clasped in front of him for a moment before spreading his arms wide.

"Welcome to my humble home, Miss Kameito, Miss Ijana, _asiyoata_ T'Saylya. I hope you had a good travel here?"

He turned towards Kameito, who had finished transferring a bioshelled page the keys to the shuttle for driving it to the garage, and took her outstretched hand for a kiss. "Very much so. It drives like a dream", she replied.

"Very good to hear; our traffic control is always very accommodating, unlike other places you are familiar with."

 _Bekenstein elitist through and through._

"And thankfully so. What use are AI traffic controls if you cannot even push them to their limits." Kameito shook her head in disappointment.

"The conservatism of society, I am afraid."

Behind them, another aircar in ground hover drew up. "I am afraid I have more guests to welcome. Please, make yourself at home; I will be welcoming you all on the terrace in half an hour."

He smiled after them as they made their way up the rest of the steps and towards the entrance. Raven spared a last glance after him, Ijana faking some interest that had just enough of a parting seize-up for a future game of social maneuvering."

Pierre Adriens had just enough of a shark in his smile, his eyes glittering with discretely and pointedly shown contempt, his pose radiating power.

He almost said it. _Welcome to Bekenstein, outsiders. Be welcome to The Game we play. Best not get burned._


	28. Mystery Dance Pt 2

They finished climbing the stairs, passing by small clusters of people that had taken up position on and around the stairs. They eyed the three new arrivals as they ascended, almost marching in lockstep. Many eyed the asari who escorted Kameito on the right side; three transhumans eyed her muscled legs approvingly..

Five seconds later, Aetheis' modified PAVI pinger with a notification: She had just become an almost literal hot point of Social Media activity; already her social score was jetting up as people voted based on the initial clip of three-dimensional video. She was now among the ten hottest asari at this social event, and climbing.

Raven saw the same, and could not hide her internal smirk. The poor Aetheis was going to have her hands full once the admirers and transhuman supremacists both zeroed in on her, then ripped each other a new asshole.

"Congratulations," Raven send a moment later. "Enjoy the evening, Miss T'Salya."

Aetheis bit pack the scathing remark she had halfway entered to send back. _I am above this._

At the top, they stepped through the Higgs field that kept the two environments separated (and also served to keep nanoswarms from intruding into the mansion proper) and split up. Within seconds, the shells of Raven and Kusanagi had wandered into the groups of transhumans and vanished.

Aetheis T'Lairo, for the evening the purple-skinned asari Anasata T'Salya, had been assigned even more supervisors than the other transhumans; her headset now housed a separate transhuman LAI for Social Maneuvering and Deception; she also had two Infomorphs running on the secure, remote uplinks to aid her.

Jolie Wehlau took over at first: "All right. Anasata, take a left turn, maneuver along the glass of the lower room, then take the stairs to the upper edge. Don't go to the second floor, but have eyes on it and the upper floor area now over you."

~ _Understood._ ~ Her eyes flickered across the room methodically, sweeping it by sector and elevation. Open ground level, a selection of tables.

She kept her aristocratic stance, head and shoulders high, bringing every spark of contempt and haughtiness to the surface.

It was easier than some small part of her thought it should be.

Another facet revelled in it, and she reminder herself of the reactions she had caused so far. Tonight her old side would be in control, she decided. She had wanted to have fun, and while her perceptions had changed… it was nice to fall back into habits and old, established worldviews. Especially when they were found confirmed.

A good, classical asari drink, and her momentary bliss would be pretty much complete.

Maybe… hopefully it would make the detriments of the evening worth it.

~ _Set the final destination as the bar_ ~, she send.

"Copy that, your destination has been set. In 50 paces, turn right…", the AI Salasa chimed in her right ear.

~ _Naughty Synthetic!_ ~

"Affirmative. Watch the group on your left now, you don't want to get tangled up with them. Avoid confrontation and eye contact especially. Images on your ARO", she was advised.

Aetheis let her eyes drift to the right. From the edge of the room, she could oversee the congregations of transhuman and Citadel guests very well - the room's floor sunk in wide terraces from the high point of the upper entrance level back down towards the opwn-air terraces outside the mansion, creating sufficient space for a sizable crowd of people to gather below the rising terraces on the far side of the room, towards the north-eastern end; judging by the lighting rigged up under the ceiling, including sets of big moving trigraphic projectors, that point would be the "stage" of the evening, conveniently placed so that people from the adjacent outdoor terrace could look inside the mansion too.

She swung back and stepped around another group of transhumans in conversation. Three of them were obviously full-body artificials, mixing strange elaborate clothing that exposed the underlying plating and internals accentuated with lighting.

~ _What is up with that?_ ~, she asked, eyeing the obvious Synthshells and their abstract humanoid faces, two of them also featuring glowing synthetic eyes or abstracted eyeballs with circuitry lines or complex, ever-changing connection patterns.

"AGI avatars. Oh, and Infomorphs too. A lot of our sophont population are Synthetic people or uploads, and many of them choose to represent themselves realside with such Shells."

~ _Synthetic And Proud?_ ~ The interface translated the mirth coming with the statement as well.

"Oh yeah. That hits it on the head, pretty much. ' _Why hide your nature? We are all equal in mind and different in body.'_ "

Aetheis looked over one of the avatars, eyeing the underlying component where they were exposed. The hand was obviously segmented, as was the face; articulation had been reduced and enhanced at the same time; there were fewer mechanical elements for the main face plating, instead supplemented by extruding surface elements and a holographic play of shapes, emulating the finer details of a moving, living face. The eyes were made from a relatively normal central corona, surrounded by a playing nimbus of golden and sapphire-colored lines that seemed to flow from the center to the rim over an infinite blackness; just ever so slightly unsettling.

Like every sentient anywhere, the transhumans had a nimbus of general entoptic information projected around them; name and age, affiliation, points of interest. In this social setting, a separate network also spun spiderwebs of topics together over their heads, streaming invites to anyone welcome to join a discussion.

One of the ARgraphic datapoints confused her, however. It had been pseudo-phonographically translated into her people's own scripture, but did not make much sense as a personal pronoun.

~ _What's the gender here? Zhe?_ Is that like nais?~

"Agender. Meas Shakeri does not identify by conventional gender. Or sex, for that matter. Probably an old AGI… yup, instantiated 2096. Zhe's an old one."

~ _And I would hazard she looks like it too._ ~

"Zhe does. A lot of baroque influence."

~ _So that is what that is?_ ~ She looked at it for another moment, using the discrete recording and replay functions of her own augmented reality hardware instead of openly staring, zooming in on the complex, gold and white patterns on the black base.

"Dropping a summary in your inbox. You can read it when you have the time, or want to drop out for a moment."

~ _...Thanks._ ~

She moved on, bypassing the group.

~ _What were they talking about?_ ~

~ Isolating voice lines - Initiating Playback T-Minus 2:32 Minutes ~

Her ARO filled with a momentary window; synthetic intellects trawling live feeds from every person in the room, selecting a few, winding them back.

 _"_ _I have to say, I am glad the Dronapratzie aren't here yet."_ A woman's voice, deep and old-sounding but not speaking young. Her ARO spit out a contextual explanation a second later: _**Dronapratzie**_ _: Human mass media form, using recording drone swarms to pursue and harass celebrities. Often times hard to avoid as they try to force almost physical collisions and trip safety overrides in perception editors._

"Do you not have privacy demons?"

Synthetic, almost turian in inflex. A synthetic then, the one with exposed legs, wearing a bright blue tunic, most likely.

"Off course I do! I do like to control my noon' appearances! But the fact that they try to jam the drones into your face…" Aetheis noted the tone of the woman. She sounds insulted. _Puts transhuman "everything for everyone, at every time" philosophy into perspective._

"I know, I know."

A third voice, higher, but sounding more experienced. Almost a flip of the first speaker. _"_ _I am using Savesta Guardians for a reason."_

 _"_ _They are over-rated."_

"Considering our illustrious host uses them too - I doubt that, Mr. Kashari."

"Really. So they do come more recommended?"

"Quite indeed so."

"Excuse me, madame, but could you please move aside?"

Slowly, she turned her face around to the speaker, letting him wait for just a moment longer before, with graceful and slow steps, she moved out of the way.

" _Merci beaucoup_." The transhuman strolled past, trying to look as tall as possible, and failing - with her shoes, she had a good three centimeters on his size, and her ice-blue eyes bored into his own.

 _You are not impressing me. Maybe you should, heh- upgrade,_ she sent an unshared mental comment after him, turning her head back to front and listening back in on the audio playback.

 _"_ _-growing tired of all the conspiracies that follow us around."_

 _"_ _Oh, let them. I don't care what some rewired lowlife on the american arm is posting to make himself feel better. They can make something out of themselves. We all can. Whatever we want to be, the only obstacles are the will to change."_

 _"_ _And we now have an entire galaxy to play in. To expand into, to make ours."_ The male synthetic again. _"_ _More than enough space for everyone of ours."_

"And what about the rest?"

"They will ascend or be left behind. You cannot beat the laws of reality with wishful thinking. The true way is looking forward and upward, not back down. There lies only limits and failure."

"Makes you think if it was an error to give them all prosthetics and export our knowledge, doesn't it? In a few decades, or a century of two, they will catch up to us once again, then overtake us. No technological advantage lasts forever, not with the raw numbers."

"Maybe, maybe not. Their distrust of AI runs deep, far deeper than their distrust even of cognitive augmentations. While we can use AIs with impunity, ensuring we stay ahead where we are strong and draw ahead everywhere else in due time.

"And some of them, like that asari, are too headstrong to ever move out of their entrenched positions in time. Like the Neo-Luddites, they will be rolled over, and crushed."

 _"_ _She does look nice, I must say,"_ the smoky voice said.

 _"_ _Maybe you can win her over?"_ , the synthetic laughed. _"_ _Apparently they go after boobs more than dicks."_

 _"_ _But why would you? I have more exciting things than an asari to fuck. They're backwards in every way. Even their "melding" has already been surpassed."_

 _"_ _Ever heard of this thing called originality? Culture and personality is what makes it exciting."_

 _"_ _Chemistry is what makes it exciting, nothing else."_

~ _Playback complete. ~_

Aetheis' head was spinning with ideas and concepts from the playback. She felt the masking skin tug at her face, looking up to keep her expression from drifting away, and a soft reminding buzz transferred through the interface.

She let her eyes drift over the ceiling. The mansion was two-and-a-half stories tall here, wide Neo-Italian marble columns separating the simple, transparent glass front set into white frames. On the lower floor, two-winged doors opened to the terraces, separated by barely visible higgs fields.  
The second floor of the mansion was apparently hung from the ceiling; no structural members were immediately visible, allowing glass-bordered walkways to circle the main floor from above.

~ _I have eyes on a few guards. Light gear, vests and powered bodysuits, and suits._ ~ She read of the IDs on her ARO. ~ _Two of them resting at a walkway, overlooking the group below._ ~

"Copy. Bar's underneath the overhang of the second floor, to your left now."

Her eyes snapped to the momentary location ping. ~ _Copy. I'm gonna listen for a bit, then make my way there._ ~

"Enjoy. By the way, I'd recommend avoiding this room soon-ish; you're getting followers, and I'm seeing some intentions to hit on you."

She sighed. ~ _Of course. Anything specific?_ ~

"I'll keep you updated." Salasa's audio channel vanished from her dashboard.

So there she drifted, allowing the conversations from around her to pattern onto her ears, filtering out snippets of conversation as she went, absorbing the environment.

"-Restoration efforts are going well. We're now contracted out with 16 different worlds for simulative geneticology of wiped out species, trying to roll back the mutation clock based on environmental sims with smart AI supervision and simulation intervention. It's quite fascinating to see-"

"-my sons are doing well, Sebastian especially. 3 years old and he's already playing Mozart like a champ! I don't know how they do it but at-"

"-No, four tails is not enough anymore. Anyone can wear a tail these days, where is the uniqueness?"

"More it not necessarily more unique-"

"-have to keep telling you, EnviXion is an amazing Vir experience! Authentic even, many of the scenes they showed I saw when I was on vacation-"

She peaked when she heard a turian voice among the groups. "Why shouldn't we upgrade?"

Aetheis stopped and turned around to the speaker; a turian with average brown-grey skin had assembled a crowd of some 15, maybe 20 people around him already. At his side stood…

Aetheis did a double take. A quarian without envirosuit, freely exposing tanned skin and black hair with reddish tips, thick strands woven into a complex braiding that layered down her back, wearing a traditional dress as it would have last been seen 3-4 centuries ago, to smoothly integrate with the more advanced envirosuits that had permeated quarian society back then; now it was moulded with a thin, envirosuit-esque costume that left the lower arms and hands exposed, showing the long, graceful quarian hands, adorned with broad rings of organically woven memory metal studded with tiny diamonds backlit by an otherworldly sparkling that travelled through the holographically etched depths of the c-allotrope.

The overall effect was stunning. Even before the Geth Rebellions and the loss of their core habitats, the quarians had been a physically frail species, vulnerable to foreign bacteria and fungi where they went; so their race had elevated environmental separation without perceived separation as far as they could. Transparent, smart-moulding helmets with semi-assisted retransmission, entirely eliminating the optical perception that a fine membrane of smart material was encompassing a quarians head. Ultra-thin, extremely tear-resistant, sensor-seeded bodysuits, that could fake skin to the outside and transmitted temperature, pressure, and texture to inducers on the inside; chemical noses and biochemical samplers that bridged the physical isolation of filtered, sterile air supply and chewlocks.

 _But this… this has to be full-body cybernetics._ Transhuman, indeed Citadel tech had no problems faking skin, but covering every single internal area in synthetic shielding and masking… no, this body had to be made using customized bionic replacements - Synthetic skin, nose, mouth, lungs and intestines, with integrated filters and synthetic bio-defenses. _And most probably also a lot more augmentations beyond that, tech-affine as the quarians were. Could she be as augmented as Voto'Leelas… I don't even know all he hides under that envirosuit of his, but his limbs are definitely replacements._

The turian spoke again: "Your civilization may have advanced the furthest along the path of self-apotheosis, but you are not alone. You never were, history shows you wrong. My people, our people", the quarian leaned a bit more onto him at those words, "never rejected augmentation. Others may have held us back, but no more.

"The gifts of augmentation, or transturianism, are many. Ever stronger bodies, more resilient, less endangered by or immune of any disease of the physical. Minds that are faster, better, inmortal, transcending physical shells and the end of consciousness. A dream of a better tomorrow, for everyone.

"That is a gift you have carried to us, and which we shall embrace alongside you."

The turian stepped into the center, his mandibles spread in excitement, spurs held high in the center in pride, the light of overhead chandeliers playing over his red, white and blue skin paint and the artificial, gold-and-platinum inlays that accented organic-looking skin at the mandibles, faceplates and fringe.

"And together, we shall ascend beyond ourselves, together." He stretched his arms out, looking skyward, closing his eyes.

"Because it is our destiny." He looked back down, and raised his glass, as the applause set in around him. He opened his eyes, and nodded to the assembled people.

"To a better future for us all." He raised the glass a last bit, then lowered it to drink.

 **"** **To a better future for us all."**

* * *

A/N **(Nick):** Well, before the comment section erupted in " _political shitstorm_ ", **some** Transhuman(or any transcended species in this story) forgo genders altogether.

Emphasis on the bolded part.


	29. Mystery Dance Pt 3

Aetheis watched the entire event from the side, careful to keep herself distanced enough from the conflux and not draw attention to herself.

"...You're still good. But I'd get some distance. You're gonna stand out among the crowd if you don't fit in, so get some distance soo- Ah crap. Don't look. You have incoming."

 _~Understood.~_

"You can't agree with him, can you?", a quarian-accented voice asked at her side.

Aetheis still almost jolted even with the forewarning, but she caught herself in time. The masking skin tugged at her face, kept it passive.

Slowly she looked around, all the while seeing and feeling how the transhuman AI reconfigured and booted new apps in the background.

Sami'Sariz vas Bekenstein nar Xateriasera had silently maneuvered herself around the perimeter of the assembling people around her partner, apparently almost as soon as she had spotted the Asari moving about, then stopping and listening as well.

"I think she's trying to turn this into a public dressing-down; she just spawned half a dozen livestreams and got posted on social media. Deflect and disengage, and don't let her get to you", Salasa informed her with an aside.

Finally, after a moment of a silent look that already transported contempt and anger for the social attack, Aetheis spoke in flowering High Thessian Selanis cant: "Pardon me, _Sheziris_ Sami'Sariz?"

"So you don't agree." The quarian girl casually dropped her own shot glass into the air; the tiny disk of a contragravity drone swept in from above and dived below the glass, rising up to easily catch it; then it rose back into the air, shimmering and vanishing into the transparency of AR-censoring.

Her other hand meanwhile gestured to Aetheis empty hands, easily resting at her side, neither applauding or returning a glass back down from drinking lips. She wasn't the only one - a few other turians, salarians and volus were visibly not clapping or were removing themselves from the area - but she was the only asari within sight. Not that surprising; few asari came to such events just due to professional interest, at least not those who were completely opposed to augmentation and transspeciesism.

Aetheis had known from the briefing she'd be an anomaly. And she had just floundered. Time to shape with the waves on the shores.

"I have concerns over the end results of Shezires Tavios Salenis' vision, yes. Self-deception and -manipulation are all treading on dangerous shores."

"And you think that is what transspeciesism is? Where's the self-deception there?"

Sami'Sariz crossed her arms as Aetheis opened her mouth to speak again; then the quarian raised a hand.

"Oh wait, _it's not there_ ", Aetheis was interrupted. Her response was a hard glare of contempt and anger at this breach of etiquette, but Sami'Sariz brushed it aside with casualness. She didn't care anymore. "It's pretense, a fancy lie of the conservative mind that fears change. Of a culture, of a people, who are not used to being left behind."

Aetheis opened her mouth again-

"What does it feel like?" The quarian leaned forward, looking into her own eyes, searching for a reaction on the face. "That feeling of losing control? When the galaxy turns away from you? It's not nice, is it? Now you know what my people felt like! Rejected for our ways, cast out, left behind to rot! Well, guess what? This time, you are wrong. Your wisdom and your… your sainthood, it matters not! Not anymore! You're 1.0, oh what am I kidding, 0.9! Might as well be Beta with your biochauvinistic attitude. And in a few more decades, you'll be nothing at all! All your high culture," her hand pointed at the Tiara of Kurinth, "your civilization, forgotten as we ascend."

[Kusanagi is inbound to get her off your back if you can't disengage.]

 _Copy._

Around her and Sami, the people were looking, some concerned, most anguished by the loud noise that intruded upon proceedings not with a sensible speech, but a rant.

Aetheis decided to smooth the waves. Mediation was even more important now. " _Sheziris_ Sami'Sariz, I understand your position, but please do not deflect from the point-"

"Oh, that's good! Hahaha, that is really good, coming from you, asari! Accusing me of deflecting! Do you see me?" She turned in front of Aetheis, spreading out her arms, the dress whirling and rising as she speed up, then slowed down, the cloth winding up around her shape before it rustled in the other direction and came back to rest.

"I am free. At last, free to walk this universe as I wish! See it as I like! Do whatever I ever dreamed off, and more! And not even the failings of the body, or the mind shall keep me.

" _Freedom_. Something you asari are always very adamant about. Freedom of choice, of life. Of existence itself."

Now, suddenly, her voice was softer, and Aetheis began to really listen again. Now the quarian spoke from her good heart.

"That is what we dream about. What the transhumans are already realizing. Think about that for this evening, asari. While you still have the time."

Aetheis thought about replying. Then she just turned, and brushed past the quarian, back to the bar.

After a moment, she stopped, turning around. "A good evening, _Sheziris_ Sami'Sariz. And thank you for your thoughts."

~I need a drink right about now,~ she signaled, suddenly tired.

Kusanagi's mental voice sounded in her ear, the now-familiar thrum of neurovocalization giving her a strange accent of sorts: [A good save from that idiotic quarian, Aetheis]

 _~Thanks. You were ready to intervene?~_

[Already did. Shut down that quarian's stream without her noticing. Bitch.]

 _~...Thank you, but why?~_

[...Let's say you aren't entirely wrong.]

Aetheis mulled over Kusanagi's words for a moment, then realized what the woman had just said.

 _~Wait, wait!~_

But Kusanagi was already gone as she climbed the stairs, and Aetheis did not manage to catch a glimpse of her pale skin among the crowd that had gathered inside the lower areas of the big room. Pale skin was apparently popular right now; she could easily see six people with similiar skin tones, but differing hairstyles. She also caught a last glimpse of Sami'Sariz and her partner. The quarian lady was talking with the turian, his hands smoothing over her right arm; he was definitely more calm than her.

 _~Why did she get so worked up over this anyway? There's a backstory there.~_

Wehlau came back in her ear, sounding slightly bored and like she was reading from a screen: "She's known to be viciously Anti-Biocon, very Pro-Transquarian. Her partner, Tavios Salenis, the one you saw speak, is a major proponent of transturianism."

 _~So I heard. Both Bekenstein… natives? I guess.~_

"Hmm. Immigrated both in 2226 after Salenis made a name for himself importing turian products into transhuman space; he also spearheaded a bunch of the popular Xeno-shells available for buying here. And both of them sleeve products of their _Shivaslaen_ line themselves."

 _~"_ Rebirth _". Very… indicative.~_

"Indeed. But, you know… I can see where she comes from."

 _~Come again?~_

"I'm currently reading the metadata on her. She's got a really big Noon'-trail, essentially from her childhood - not surprising given she's a quarian. She grew up when transhumanity had just entered the galactic scene, aboard the Nascata Task Force. That Task Force is known to have really suffered under continued exile and hostility in the galactic west, Sol-relative. Uh, by the time she was a teenager she was enticed by our people. Big philosophical blog entries, long Vir discussions… even played transhuman-based RPG games a lot, judging by what I can see here."

Aetheis subtly shook her head.

"Then she found her now-partner on her Pilgrimage, and from there it went. Brilliant with engineering and biotech integration judging by what I can see; she also struck a big contract with Sirta Augmentics for prototype clinical tests on quarian augments and BMI tech. That's how she got her foothold in transhuman society and allowed herself to build up to what she is now."

 _~Look… a moment of pause, please? If I could, I'd like to enjoy my drink without heavy thoughts.~_

"No problem. I recommend the… _pashiviali_. They serve it with original Thessian ingredients, and in proper _tshi'sartouzi_."

Aetheis stopped in her tracks. "What?", she whispered, shocked.

"You heard me right. Mr. Howard Antonio Sanchelli-Bauer leads the bar here tonight. He's very skilled. So you're in good hands."

 _~That name does not tell me anything,~_ she pointed out.

A file dropped into her Inbox. "Allow this little file, and his person, to shed light on his skill then. It's on the house." With an audible smile, the transhuman signed off.

And the evening has only started. Athame's azure, I wanted to enjoy this.

 _...Why didn't I shout her down?_

She reminder herself of her posture. _You're letting yourself get dragged down. For nothing._

Finally she spilled from the crowd and onto the large area around the bar; winding tables of carved wooden spirals, covered with thin silk sheets weighted by cheap 50 carat diamonds with gold inlays, trigraphic interface spires of white light surrounded by blue-white polygons hovering above them, provided a place to rest drinks.

Right now, the place was mostly empty, the snack bowls still (or again?) filled to a perfectly balanced amount, and the bar itself was vacated, safe for one transhuman of which she could only see the dark hair in the shadow of the red and orange light currently playing across the bottles and glasses. She approached one of the chairs, and slowly sat down, careful to not sit on any of the draping cloth strips, then arrayed her hands on the bartop.

"Good evening _asiyoata_ T'Salya," a warm transhuman male's voice said to her.

His six hands landed on the bartop, two pairs holding hands in different postures.

Howard Antonio Sanchelli-Bauer was definitely the most exotic transhuman she had seen over the last years, apparently dedicated wholesale to his one work - bartending and mixing of drinks and cocktails. His shell was humanoid, and had the same rough proportions - a look thoroughly destroyed by the six arms sprouting from the upper torso, ending in hands with two thumb and six extra-jointed fingers. Two pairs had open synthetic looks with gunmetal black metal and dark, carbon composite backed by red-gold highlights, but she had no doubt the entire Shell was bionic; no biological construction would be able to support three pairs of arms easily.

"You are dedicated", she remarked.

"Oh yes, _asiyoata_ , to drink and drinker. What would you prefer?"

"I've heard you're making a _pashiviali_ … I would like it as a Serrice classical. And a good one, please."

"Most certain, _asiyoata_. One _pashiviali_ Serrice Classical, on the style of Matriarch D'Sayatio, for you."

Behind him, the bar started rotating in tune with changing lights; the glass and diamond vessels of human spirits rolling to the right, their artisan paper etiquettes flashing for a last moment with latin and asian characters before they vanished out of view.

The flower pots melted away and shimmered with a glass-like texture full of colored cracks as they reshaped into facsimiles of Thessian flowers in asari-like pottery; spiralling upwards from a wide base. She had to concede, the recreation was perfect to the eye.

The rush of new light, blue and green with warm white, made her look up; new asari bottles were now rotating into view, the rows coming to a stop from to bottom. The liquid within did not slosh about a bit.

Sanchelli-Bauer's left second left hand reached under the counter and came back up with a framework of smoked glass and sapphire crystal, spiraling into an abstract shape from its looped foot piece; the material had been molded for a full hold with the left or a thumb-and-finger hold with the right; perfect for social evenings, leaving the strong hand free. He carefully placed it on the top, then brought up a big, carat-style hand-blown mixing glass with golden inlays of High Thessian runes spelling out the name of the artist along the lower throat, a highly polished mixing cup, and an elegant sapphire mixer with discrete platinum wiring wrapping around the grip and down the shaft.

The bartenders second right hand casually danced across the mirrored surface of the table-top, and the first ice ball seemed to phase out of a spot on the table, rising into the air and tumbling about inside an invisible bubble; Aetheis felt the thrum of the modulated mass effect field edge. The transhuman turned around, a third right off-hand pushing the mixing glass under five tumbling ice balls, and one after another they levitated down the throat into the glass.

Aetheis had to admit it was fascinating watching Sanchelli-Bauer practise his trade. He was utterly skilled and smooth with his arms, easily multi-tasking the different things of a bartender, quickly and expertly picking bottles out of his impressive collection and holding them by one, evidently strong hand and arm; then he arrayed the future ingredients easily side by side, and started by pulling the cork off a bottle of Serrice shelse'visa, 2682 A.C.E., measuring a good two and a half ounces of the thick, violett-ish liquid before pouring it into the mixing glass.

"So what has brought you here this evening, _asiyoata_?"

"A friends graceful invitation," Aetheis explained, then stopped as the transhuman laid his two biological-looking hands on the glass and she felt the rising harmonics of an… expert biotic sleight.

"You really were tutored by Matriarch D'Sayatio."

The man smiled. "Indeed so. We met fourteen years ago at a large convention at Old Florence; she was fascinated by the old italian wines and the cocktails of transhumanity. I showed her some of my most priced drinks… so she showed me a few of hers.

"I love mixing these kind of drinks." Half an ounce of Kashiwi-9 juice landed in the mixing glass and was stirred with a casual swivel. "You can learn so much about alien cultures through their cuisines - Asari teas, salarian fruits, the ales of the batarians, the masterful stews and bread of the turians… the alternative kitchens. Quarian CHON-hacking is impressive to say the least….

"And the classical drink." Three drops of bitters were the last to land inside the drink. Sanchelli-Bauer casually swirled the diamond-saphire mixer through all six of his hands before plunging it into the mixing glass and beginning to stir the liquid within together with the ice. "Distilled from unique biospheres, with unique aroma but a common base of spirits and other psychoactive substances… always something different from communality."

A hand vanished under the table and pulled out a tray out of a hidden-away refridgerator, easily picking up the bead of pearls within it. At the same time, another hand grabbed the _tshi'sartouzi_ , and primed it with an easy hand. The air within the framework shimmered, then swirled as kinetic fields sketched themselves into being.

The transhuman brought both together, and watched the chilled pearls spiral down and through the fields, bouncing around inside the geometry for a moment. Then he placed a fine mesh filter on the mixing bottle, and began to pour the _pashiviali_ , taking his proper time.

Aetheis watched as the liquid poured down into the glass and began the first change of color, interacting with the fields of the _tshi'sartouzi_ , running through the dynamically permuting, two-layer kinetic field structure of the "glass", swirling over itself, but never changing overall volume distribution and thus, the level of the drink.

"Here we are. _Samei shazu'se, asiyoata_."

" _Deyse_."

She swirled the fluid in the glass for a moment, then tasted the cocktail, eyes closed, sampling what Sanchelli-Bauer had created.

The conclusion was surprising, kind of humiliating, and for a moment she searched for words. "This is…" she still searched for words; Sanchelli-Bauer turned around from putting the bottles back in their place, and smiled at her expectantly. "...perfect."

He bowed ever so slightly. "Thank you. You honor me and the lessons of my teacher."

"Also", she asked, "are you a natural biotic?"

"I am afraid not; the Mediterranea has remained rather free of natural eezo exposures over the decades. But I had the work done a few decades back; it has always stayed with me. As a matter of fact, I pioneered the transhuman equivalent of _Tsa'ari ikelirai_ ; using eezo-rich, self-neutralizing nanocompounds to mix drinks."

"My respect, especially making it safe for consumption by non-asari."

"Thanks again. Enjoy the drink." He vanished to the left, approaching another customer.

Aetheis raised the drink again, and breathed in the fumes before taking another sip.

"A long evening already, is it?", a salarian voice asked at her side, slow and melodious.

She looked up and turned around on her stool. The salarian was a male, a pale blue skin with red and white highlights over his horns and cheek; minute augmentations were visible at the sides of his head. The dress was meticulous smart fabric, bulging out his form and trailing behind him at shoulders and hips, primarily green with again white highlights.

"Ridann Poralan", the salarian introduced himself.

"Anasata T'Salya." They shook hands the Citadel way.

"Well, _asiyoata_ T'Salya", Poralan smiled. "Welcome to Bekenstein. I hope the… introduction did not scare you. I'll be taking a Harelohw", he said to the passing Sanchelli-Bauer.

"Coming right up, Sir."

The salarian leaned back. "Why are you here tonight?", Aetheis asked.

"For business, I am afraid."

He turned to her, his black eyes fixing her face.

"Now, what about you?"


	30. Mystery Dance Pt 4

_And from one game to the next. At least this time I won't get ranted at._

"Private Military Contractor, Asthera Solutions. Our previous speciality was in contracted Peacekeeping, but we've been branching out into Assault-and-re-control operations under the Systems Alliance as well as bounties in the greater Verge theater." Aetheis applied a slight biotic twitch to the drink and relished in the sharpened hit of the next sip she took from the cocktail.

Asthera Solutions did indeed exist - as a joint Asari-Spectre cover front, maintained independently of the STG's Galactic Cover Organisation program partially for security reasons and data containment; the group was a shell game within a shell game within a shell game, encapsulating a few trusted operators on-call by Citadel Special Forces to serve as cover, both social and military, whenever required.

The Verge theater was only a partial lie… but good enough for the short-term purposes. Discreet Section 9 man-in-the-middle editing work of any requested portfolios in the background would ensure the rest.

"Asthera… interesting. Did you run combat ops in salarian space, by any chance?"

"Yes sir. Our largest in the last decade was the Sharash intervention in 2727 A.C.E.", she told him. She had actually been involved in that particular debacle on a salarian colony world, skulking around in an infiltrator suit in the swampy countryside as she tracked agitators through the bioforming-in-process environment. It had been a hard three weeks under camouflage, with a sniper rifle, and running of CHON paste and recycler micro-ware. But commandos prevailed through worse. She certainly had.

"Hmmm. That was good work. An ugly situation, to say the least, but well-controlled in the end. Almost salarian", Poleran complimented her.

"We had a salarian commander at the helm during that situation actually; a command group from Isokerat Think Tanks. How were you involved?"

Poleran turned his head to the the wall of new spirits that rotated into view, including a complicated kiggs-field-based refridgerator row. Aetheis halfway followed his gaze, but kept a window with a hijacked scanner feed from somewhere over their heads on her ARO, piped in by the supporting hacker team. The bar has to incredibly complex behind the scenes; no way these were just rotary rings. Her gaze drifted to the invisible ARO feed, and its biometric overlays.

People always assumed salarian eyes were impossible to track, because visually, they were - you only saw the black membranes that covered the eyeballs. But the salarians had evolved as enough of a predator species that they had stereoscopic vision and tracking eyeballs, and in the infrared and UV spectrum, their vision was easily trackable through the protective membrane. The holographic security scanners spread throughout the house had the EM band and resolution to pick out every detail; right now Aetheis just used the hijacked mundane functionality of eye-tracking.

Poleran's change of view had not been a trick to distract her, but she played along anyway, not giving away her own advantage. He was clearly playing a game, testing her story - now she'd be testing his.

 _~Any flags so far?~_

"Negative."

Poleran finally looked back over, watching Sanchelli-Bauer fiddle with a chilled glass for a moment.

"Data and blueprint trading with Itishisoro Ltd. We were involved with genetic templates used in the Sharash Ashenerisa adaptations; we also sold Digital Fabrication plans for a wide selection of bioforming systems used on Ashenerisa. The conflict significantly impacted our profit margin with bioforming-associated DFPs. Not to mention the Wheels-breaking information quarantine; every single delivery of licenses and DFPs we wanted to send had to be checked. Twice. The swift resolution of that matter helped us recover our losses somewhat, thankfully. So you could say I am personally grateful."

 _Because your personal cut didn't suffer too much,_ Aetheis completed his words in her head.

She simply nodded to him slowly in a gesture of asari "you're welcome" and took another sip of the drink, flaring her biotics in the upper volume of the _tshi'sartouzi_ ; the fluid turned from its characteristic blue-violet to a green-tinged light blue as it flowed through the field and into her mouth. The resulting texture was slightly thicker, and burned; then came the kick, ramping up, hitting its climax, and receding, clearing her head in a rush of impulses she shaped on old instincts.

"I'm assuming the Verge expansion is why you are here on Bekenstein?"

Aetheis nodded. "We're probing cooperation with transhuman defense and private military contractors after a few on-the-spot joint operations over the last year."

"Augmentations as well?"

 _That's the crack point, isn't it?_

Behind them, Sanchelli-Bauer came up with Poleran's chosen drink, a Harelohw.

The alcoholic drink had started its live as a small culture of plant-derived cell bodies, fired into a nutrient gel held inside a randomly shaped catomic vessel, slowly multiplying over the following days, building up sugars, aromatic compounds, and ethanol. Different cell types had replicated with different ratios, growing into colorful patches of different fruit derivatives; finally the calcium-extruding cells had begun growing the intricate patterns that formed the shape of the future glass.

Stored in stasis, the heavy alcoholic fruit juice had persisted as a perfect cell culture until the point Sanchelli-Bauer had put it into a special device and allowed warp fields to turn the cells into a iced smoothie, with almost zero intermix ratio of the various fruit patches. Through the semi-transparent sides, Aetheis could see the colors of salarian fruits, ranging from deep reds over violet to greens, oranges and yellows.

"There you are, Sir, one _Harelowh_."

"Thank you." Poleran took the salarian cocktail glass in his hand and raised it. Aetheis followed his lead, flaring her biotics again, tuning the tiny eezo v-atoms integrated into the organic compounds of the drink, causing molecules to reorganize themselves and color agents to change the drinks color into a rich green hue. The second stage, more alcoholic, spicy and a bit thicker, the main phase of the pashiviali. Doing this right took decades of training; too much and the drink became too alcoholic early on, running the risk of serious intoxication; not enough and the social ritual was imperfect.

The _pashiviali_ was a matron's drink.

"To good business," Poleran intoned.

"To good business." They clinked glasses together, and drank.

Salasa came back the same moment: "Bad news. We finished audited Poleran, and he's flagging. AIS has him on file as an STG-affiliated data pusher; cross-referencing with Spectre Archives confirms. He's got people behind him; we're seeing signs of an encoded datastream in his netcode."

She was still drinking. _~Copy that. What a surprising wave from the winds.~_

She lowered the _tshi'sartouzi_ and turned the smoked crystal framework that was its only solid component in her hands; watching the light break on the crystal and the cocktail move within the confines of the intertwining, dynamically changing mass effect fields that held it there. The _tshi'sartouzi_ was a complicated piece of technology, old in vision but new in realization; power systems capable of truly turning the device and its content into an enduring feature had only entered the market in the recent decades, and human nano-cap cell elements had turned them from a fit sprinter into marathon runners capable of powering their generators for hours before it became advisable to return them to a charging station, and in turn the popularity of the devices had exploded, if only in knock-offs, for asari artisans still treated the _tshi'sartouzi_ with a massive amount of respect and care.

This one was definitely an original hand craft, judging by the runes near the bottom, spelling the name of Master Artisan of the _'Shatelrih_ , Amisia T'Lairo. One of her distant cousins then, actually, she noted with amusements. Maybe younger too, judging by the runes of her Mentors and the forges she had practised in. The script was larger, drawn out to run the entire rim of the glass; the mark of a young artisan, not an old one who did not need fillers to complete the line.

She settled the cocktail back on the bar surface and turned around to look down on the crowd of people below.

"It's hard to feel at home here, isn't it?", Poleran remarked.

She kept herself from nodding unconsciously. _It is._

"It is a strong reminder that under commonalities we all… are on our own."

The reply was a salarian snort, a short sharp inhale through mouth and nostrils both. "Yeah."

She turned to Poleran, who had turned around on his own chair and was leaning against the bar. Some part of her wanted to ask if it was uncomfortable; his lean torso made it look like he had adopted a decidedly unhealthy position to asari eyes.

"Yeah", the Salarian repeated, downing a big gulp of his own chosen drink, nodding to himself several times.

"Do _not_ relax," Salasa's voice suddenly manifested in her ear. "You're starting to relax too much, he'll see that."

Suddenly, the masking skin manifested itself again as the smart material within it stiffened up ever so slightly, and stimulating currents ran from it into her own muscles. She bit back the grimace that wanted to unfold.

"He's using xeno-social cueing. That is why you are relaxing. And he's good; just enough intermix ratio at a time."

Shit.

Poleran spoke: "-umans have this saying: 'Home is where the heart is.' I have to admit… it is hard to connect your heart with this place. The old woods and waters of Tsu'Kesh remain unbeaten in that regard."

"So do the spiraling towers of Shamiz for me", Aetheis admitted. The colony was close enough to Sharizea, that she could make the statement by actual heart. She smiled in fond simulated memory, thinking of the actual times she had watched the orange-blue light of Kasirea break off the glass panels and crystal inserts, play across the walkways of organized carbon plates layered atop of each other, mixing with colorful rock strata expertly cut and furnished, and the familiar people on the streets, aircars in the skies, suborbitals and shuttles drawing condense trails through clear skies.

"Fond memories."

"Indeed so."

The salarian took a sip, rested the glass thoughtfully for a moment, then took another, bigger one. "I hope to gain as many as you."

She smirked, biting back the snort. _Very subtle._ He could not resist getting a few punches in, it seemed.

 _To be expected, really._

"Then may you find favorable winds and waves on your quest."

Poleran turned around and raised his glass: "On that, anew, we drink. And thank you."

They clinked cocktails together again, diamond against smokey crystal framework, and Poleran rubbed his head with one hand, fingers gliding over one of the open implants.

 _~How many augmentations does he have?~_

Salasa answered again, the AI faster on the ball than the other transhumans in the background. She fetched a package, and rendered a fresh AR overlay. White and blue mesh outlined Poleran's skeleton and organs, then violet and green sketched out implant after implant, augmentation after augmentation.

The… penetration was extensive. It was hard to belief the sophont was actually a salarian… was he?

"Full cranial braincase, Level-III, titanium exoskeleton and piezogel shock absorbers; reinforced spine with the same reinforcements. Full-brain DNI, Class-D4-M6-Q9 primaries, with heavy exocortex extension interfacing, primarily cortex and memory centers; several subconsciousness processing clusters close behind. Custom-grown neural highways. Partial neurocircuitry replacement and -extension in sensory centers, frontal cortex areas; lacing throughout the rest of the cortex.

"Extensive internal computing resources as well; a slew of dedicated sub-processor arrays, housing space for at least one Class-II LAI or equivalent. That has to be a transhuman implant. Implanted comp array, and… dedicated exocortex housing."

Aetheis gazed down. _~Is that in his abdomen and crotch…~_

"Yes. The replacement with synthetic intestines and the general body boosting has created sufficient space for the housing of a neurocircuitry exocortex in the area, linked by Infiniband optical fibre bus."

Aetheis suppressed a shudder.

 _~Does Kusanagi…~_

"Not like this, no. Otherwise, not much to stand out. Interface ports, augmented eyes, minor skin visual arrays… biotech and threading implant boosting of the general body and especially the muscles and ligaments; bioglass bone strengthening. Extensive epigenetic fixing work."

 _~...All of that is in his profile?~_

"Yes. What modern data mining can gather, huh?"

As if to make a point, a list of entoptic data points scrolled next to each implant. Date of installation, release, exact model number, producer, installer, even reasons why. She could only infer that much thanks to another entoptic text line showing what was rendered for her.

 _~Okay, I get the point.~_

The entoptic overlay collapsed, vanishing away.

She put down her cocktail, having used it to discretely hide her other conversation. The _pashiviali_ had taken on a slightly violet hue again, with blue particulates. It was the late of the second wave; the first sharp dip of ethlise'isi and shikali was subsiding.

"If you would excuse me, but I think I will go outside for a moment."

"But off course, _asiyoata_ T'Salya! You are not bound by me at any time! Enjoy the evening!"

She smiled in parting, swinging her legs off the bar stool and stepping off towards the open doorways, and the slowly sinking sun of Boltzmann visible beyond.

* * *

 **TECHNOLOGY**

 **Organized Carbon and C-allotropes**

One of the first modern nanotechnology breakthroughs with all Citadel species was the development of simple carbon organizers, first pioneered inside "wet" working environments that suspended the nano-systems and their working materials in various liquids (this technology among other things makes it easier for nanosystems to navigate and maintain position, while also providing more convenient cooling, though erosion and fluid-based breakdown can be an issue.) These carbon organizers became increasingly capable of creating more and more complex carbon structures from raw feedstock (commonly graphite), starting with one very simple material: Diamond.

The development of carbon organizers triggered in all cases what is called a "Diamond Crash", as the value of the material as a currency collapsed; at the same time organized synthetic diamond created a whole new range of material applications.

In the modern era, organized carbon, also simply known as c-allotropes due to the many different configurations, from diamond over carbon nanotubes, graphene to buckyballs and other, more complex and varied structures, is used for many applications. Modern "glassware" is often made from c-allotrope diamonoid instead of silicon oxides, being both more lightweight and far more resilient to damage; in the same manner structural components are often made from c-allotropes. Modern dry carbon organizer can furthermore "print" or "grow" c-allotropes in many micro- and nanoscopic shapes; including hollow spaces for further reduced weight, ingrained holographic and other light-breaking structures, or even engineering metamaterials with counter-intuitive mechanical behavior. C-allotrope diamonoids are also used as a common component in military armor for heavy infantry, vehicles, and spacecraft, as heatsink conduits for thermal managment applications, and for optical components.


	31. Mystery Dance Pt 5

The world looked orange, blue, violet, and underneath it was true color.

It had a thousand voices, at precise points in space and time, moving on their vectors, circling the social dance of attraction, deflection, concentration and dissolving akin to primal base patterns. Their complexity peeled apart and predicted by the AI pantheon he heard chattering in the back of his "Shadow", the neural interface extension of his sapient mind into the datasphere, always present and ready to jump to his aid.

Voto'Leelas' virtual ghost hovered over the guests of the party, viewing the AR-saturated rendering of the mansion interior computed from the hundreds of scanner feeds spread throughout the room, looking at it from every angle. The data was perfect, adaptive software taking the individual holographic feeds and rendering them together into a live, 400-fps holographic aggregation render that was also immediately archived on both the security servers of Deep Six Solutions and, through the now-hijacked landline connection and eventual orbital uplink farm, com satellites, into the digital backbone of the SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ , and onto her servers.

He reached for the phantom manipulator of the camera in front of his eyes, "grabbing" it and moving his vision around, flying low over people's heads. Digital voxels drew themselves on their faces as he closed in, entoptic data feed after data feed winding itself around their heads. Audiographs, facial and body biometrics, live transcripts of their words, metadata context trawling, complex relationship networks spinning themselves above their heads.

Deep Six Solutions had a massive amount of analytics running; Section 9 piggybacked off the same data, throwing its more powerful tools at the same to increase the analytics scope beyond simple threat recognition, smart home duties, and violence pre-emption.

He called up the list of involved suites.

 _Wait a second… TITAN/HESTIA?_

He subtitled the line and sent a query, looking at the detailed list of software processes.

 _TITAN/HESTIA/SUB… that's like… four dozen separate sub-tools? What is this?_

He scrolled down. Each process was massive, drawing dozens of exabytes of RAM and significant processor resources. _60% neural network processor load? That has to be an AI._

Which made sense, he told himself. TITAN itself wasn't much of a secret. The vaunted digital ASI network of the Systems Alliance. But HESTIA?  
 _  
This one… draws a lot of quantum work memory. And quantum processing in general._

He checked the output formats. They were probability trees, unfolding in low-resolution preview renders, event points, causality threads, outcomes and timestamps annotated to them in text and color.

[Hey, Ishikawa?]

[Yeah?]

[What's… TITAN/HESTIA?]

In the same moment, his systems spit out a reply for the Hestia query: **Hestia** (Globo, sEng / romanized Greek): Human greek goddess of hearth, architecture, and the right ordering of domesticity, the family, the home, and the state

 _Huh._

[TITAN Cluster. Social dynamics and predictions, we're using it for personality and crowd analytics primarily, threat trawling secondary.]

[That's… how intelligent is it?]

[The Core we have? Not very much. 'Bout as smart overall as roughly four to six transhumans per core heuristics entity, but it's limited purview. SAI. The rest is normal software. And our Uplink rate is inherently limited at the moment, so Synch rate is… 12%.] The transhuman pulled up another window and highlighted some numbers.

[ _Normal_ software.] He dived another layer into the diagnostic audits of the system.

[Well - yeah.] Ishikawa's own embarrassment transmitted back across the channel; the transhuman was using the full communications envelope of the Neurovocalization system on trained instinct. [No neural networks or such. Classical mathematical crunching and prediction sims. Data mining. The works.]

[You made any progress on tracking the location of NOVUM SPIRITUS?] Voto returned his attention to the visual inputs of the party renders, poking a transhuman in his blue face in jest, then zooming back out. As the virtual camera turned, he caught a flash of Aetheis' currently violet skin, stepping out onto the terraces.

He pulled up her live biometric feeds; she was already slightly intoxicated.

If his understanding of asari drinks was correct - the way they changed under biotic field exposure and how the customs worked - she was drinking hard; the rant having hit her harder than Voto'Leelas expected based on what he knew of her.

 _But then, before today… she never saw Transhumans as anything but criminals and petty scum, or misled children on a path to destruction. Seeing this in comparison, shoved into her face in the span of a few days..._

 _Sorry for my_ sashalea'as _words_ , he silently send after her. She deserved a word after this.

..would she shout at him?

Ishikawa ripped him out of his boosted thoughts.

[No hits so far. The security AI on the darn vault recordings is an irregular model; no override. We only cracked it five minutes ago, and sub-heuristics are still fighting back. Tenacious little thing.]

[How close?]

[We're ± 1 hour around the primary event point, expanding to two hours as we speak… huh, four- no, six event flags.]

There was silence on the other end.

[ _Sonofabitch_.]

[What?] The render of the mansion swooped sideways as Voto'Leelas exited the virtual space, and "swooped" over to Ishikawa's workspace.

The transhuman cleaned it up as the quarian entered, "enlarging" the feed he was watching by upping its priority; visual information streamed in through the neural interfaces.

The feed was another render of a virtual camera, perched inside Adrien's massive office within the public compound, overlooking an elevated podium with a frankly oversized table of dark earth-sourced wood; windows wrapped around almost the entire circle of the office, showing the surrounding roofs filled with walk gardens, two sun and one tea terrace, and lots of colored gravel arranged in tasteful artwork. Voto'Leelas called up satellite imagery of the estate, uncensored hyper-resolution shots from the transhuman Office of Space Intelligence, isolating the compound on semi-AI-assist. The gravel images were a mixture of alien landscapes and figures mixed with highly symbolic imagery; the core was a human figure, rendered in "neo-egyptian style", sun rays of gold emitting behind its head.

 _As subtle as an Elcor Bombard to the face_ , 'Leelas thought sardonically.

The recording timestamp showed the event as having taken place some 46 minutes ago, and Ishikawa restarted the playback.

Five human wireframe renders came up the stairway to the office, direct view blocked by the wall and thus substituted through the AR that wasn't quite AR inside the Datasphere; Voto quickly substituted the basics with ID entoptics. Adriens was leading the group, slowly climbing the stairs and taking his time to point at unseen objects in the stairwell: "...a classical work of the Italian renaissance; and yes, it is an original. Sealed behind nano-diamond."

"Quite fascinating, but could we please move with it?", a "Texan" transhuman female voice stated, the third person on the stairwell. Kate Xun Dayson according to the entoptic ID, born 2197 A.D., New Los Angeles System in the "American arm". Ahead of her was Thomas Mansori, another UIAS-born citizen, 2194 A.D. and Thara Young as well as Gaspar Stone, all-

[How normal is it for such a group to all come from the same background of former polity, with roughly aligned birthdates? The drift seems…]

[That's not what's setting me off] Ishikawa said. [That happens more often than you think. 35 years may have passed since the Unification, but transhuman memory, and two centuries of history, that runs deep. No, these guys are freshly resleeved. And Thara Young had a _male_ Sleeve until two days ago.]

Ishikawa expanded the group of windows, freezing the playback momentarily. The world through the pseudo-window froze, Adriens' face just stepping into his office proper, mouth contorted in mid-speech, showing blindingly white AR frameworks became visible, imposing themselves on faces and bodies.

[Alright, so kinematic analytics can tell you a lot about a person, especially when they don't have the masking software and pseudo-entities our people use. Resleeving always comes with issues; more so than masking skin. You're inside a new body after all, and that means re-mapping things - especially instinctive reactions, tics, fine motor control. Between sexes, those issues can get exasperated, so normally there should be acclimatization time… which "Thara" did not have.]

[More of that TITAN goodness, hmm?] Voto'Leelas asked.

[Yup.] Ishikawa "leaned back", withdrawing his high-bandwidth connections for a moment of mental respite. [Cracks even good disguises, and these ones are pretty much rubbish by cutting-edge standards.]

[Takes a lot of processing power though, does it not?]

[Oh yeah. And training, or experience, depending on your exact terminology. TITAN's been doing this for half a century, when we folded in its immediate precursor components; the recursive improvements stack. But a normal social analyzer or what Adriens has kicking around on his home network… at best vague suspicions with irregular flag "flares", but no solid analytics like we get.]

[I wish I ever had this kind of processing power… or AI system...] He "stared" at the hardware screen, dismissing it after another moment.

[Patience kid, we all get what we want one day.] Ishikawa restarted the playback.

"-ertainly, madame, but I thought a small tour of my illustrious home might be enjoyable to you."

"Rather not, I am afraid", Mansori said, seizing up the room, eyes gliding everywhere. A strange radiance spread through the playback, as if the transhumans gaze projected an aura of fire. A message from the house security system was overlaid, attached to the holographic recordings.

⟨ Warning: Laser lense scan detected ⟩

"Surveillance even up here? Adriens, if you don't take security seriously…"

"It is cached to my private server farm, and heavily encrypted. A dozen watchdog AIs on every port into it. Trust me, any recordings of this meeting will not leave this room. Also, now… it should shut off..." Adriens wandered to a panel and hit a rapid sequence of keys with augmented speed, "now."

The playback _didn't_ freeze. [He still recorded it.]

[Yeah. And his personal security was good, but not good enough. Adriens is like a hundred other rich assholes, they think their Greytech will keep people out, so they don't airgap data. Bypassing the AIs was done depressingly quick, and it took us all 25 minutes to have the ASA brute-force his encryption.]

[All the better for us….]

[Heh, yeah. Especially because he got us hands-on data.]

"So, please, have a seat." Adriens made a sweeping motion towards his desk and the group of chairs in front of it. "Can I get you anything to eat, or maybe a drink?"

"A coke, please", Stone said with a smirk on his face, settling his hispanic-japanese sleeve in one of the chairs. "Oh, and chips, if you have those."

"Certainly." Adriens' facial expression almost screamed _barbarian_ , even without facial topology analytics and over the gulf of different species.

"Anything else?" he asked to the rest of the group, then nodded. "Very well."

"Let's get down to business then, shall we?", Thomas Mansori asked.

Adriens folded his hands: "Most certainly, Falcon."

"It's Thomas Mansori now. Falcon is dead, burned when those Core scoundrels raided our base and forced us to scramble. The _Liberty's Wrath_ still bears the internal wounds of their bastardous spacecraft."

"So, what happens now?"

"Our mission is done, the package is complee. The other cells will finish the job when it is time. We'll be headed to Kopernikus."

"And speaking of the package," Mansori interrupted, "here is it."

His hand sneaked into his suit pocket, and withdrew with a standard 150-petabyte MTDA stick; the electronics-packed rectangular device was just large enough to fit into his hand. The gold-highlighted cab-protected InfiniPort was at one end; a fingerprint reader with the golden pin-points of peripheral hand contacts was installed on the other end.

The unassuming secure storage device landed on the table.

Everyone just stared at it for a moment: Adriens, Mansori and his group, Ishikawa and Voto'Leelas through the playback feed. The most cutting-edge cognoweapon known to the galaxy, with the sharpest teeth though yet without venom (as it had no payload yet), and able to wreak unimaginable havoc.

The five transhumans in the recording stared at it with wolfish hunger, and pride. Dayson especially looked upon the data stick with the pride of someone who could only have been involved in its development. Voto'Leelas put a flag on her head: "Likely Lead Programmer." Two seconds later, an addendum to the flag appeared: "Analytics concur."

"Almost want to grab it, don't you?" Ishikawa asked, freezing the playback. Voto looked back and realized his hand had stretched out, almost reaching into the virtual space of the sim. Sheepishly. he withdrew his Avatar's hand. "Yeah, me too," Ishikawa admitted. "Pluck it right of that table like Amaterasu from heaven, and we'd be done."

"Have to admit, I wish it was that easy. But then, those _bosh'tets_ deserve a beating. So there's that for… catharsis, as your people say."

⟨ **_Bosh'tet_** ( _Noun, Khelish, Quale'rean branch_ ): Quarian curse word with general use; excremental connotations ⟩, Ishikawa's muse silently spit out.

"And it's gonna be cathartic, brother."

Inside the playback, Adriens reached out slowly, almost in awe, and plugged the stick of the table, turning it before his eyes. " _Incredible_. Absolutely incredible."

"This, ladies and gentlemen," he said as he held the stick in front of everyone between his thumb and index finger. "This is the key to our future."

"Once complete, yes. Our compatriots will have to do the rest of the forging, but then? Then we will have our first ace. A weapon to turn them against each other, and secure our so-long denied wishes and a better future for all. Free of the oppression of the core governments and their societies that hold onto us colonies like leeches in their bid for growth and interstellar commerce and their stupid powerplays, their notion of unity without individualism and self-actuation. That era ends… soon."

"And at last we will all be free to forge our own destiny."

Adriens stood up, pocketing the stick, and turned to the shape of an entering servant, carrying a chilled bottle of champagne and five glasses with her four arms. "Something to drink to, gentlemen," Adriens said, casually drawing the female servant into a light hug. "Thank you, my dear."

Silently, she rested the items on the table, and disappeared. Adriens stared after her for a moment, then grabbed the champagne and uncorked it with an expert motion and satisfying sound; letting the foam jet out of the bottle and run down its sides before scooping up the first glass and filling it up to perfect level. The entire performance was acted to perfectionism; in the end, five identical glasses rested on the tablet they had been carried in on.

"To our destiny, ladies and gentlemen."

Stone grabbed his coke, leaning against his chair: "Yep, to destiny."

[This guy just does not care], Ishikawa remarked.

"You know, destiny is such a vague thing, especially for someone like you, Adriens. Should I say… to profit? Because you aren't in this for some noble ideal. Not as a Bekenstein native. Not in such a mansion, with dozens of sapient class-I servs, and a financial empire that spans transhuman space." His hands swept the wide window front, turning to Adriens.

"You're in it for control, pure and simple. You want Bekenstein as a true Ilium, free to do as you wish, don't ya?"

Adriens was silent for a moment, then smiled. It was not a very nice one.

"Quite astute of an observation, _Raptor_." His words dripped with arrogance. "Yes, I want Bekenstein to be free. Building this planet during the time of the European Stellar Federation was an achievement without compare; years of lobbying and memetic engineering to convince the High Parliament and their constitutes that Bekenstein would be to the advantage of the ESF. And it was. This planet has a legacy of transhuman brilliance few other centers can match, especially away from The Core. And then… came the First Contact War, and the Systems Alliance with its new rules and policies, and the Council then with theirs. Restriction upon restrictions, scrutiny, new laws and less possibilities.

"The only reason we have our freedom, or what remains of it, is our export worth and position in relation to Citadel space. That their corporations like this position and its laws, and, in turn, lobby to keep it that way. That we don't export agriculture and augs, but culture, art, and high technology, that we offer knowledge you cannot study in Citadel space. Our rich culture and tourism is an attractor for billions of sophonts each year, and that brings in credits. Credits the Systems Alliance needs. Products that by now are desired enough in Citadel Space to maintain our status quo.

"But, as I said, that status quo is only a shadow of its former self. It is not what we strived to built with Bekenstein, what we work to achieve as a way of life. The Alliance has ensured that. But if the Alliance is reformed… when we all are freed from the shackles of our oppression… we can go back to the days of self-control and -actualization. And I think that is someone everyone here can agree on - That is why we are here, that is what you fight for, and what I and others support."

Stone finished crunching a chip between his teeth and clapped slowly. "Bravo, bravo."

Adriens only gave him a flaring look of disapproval.

"What? I mean, I dig your nice speech. Well-rehearsed and all." Another two chips were crushed between teeth. "Just - spare us some of the drama, alright? We're not idiots either." A hand landed on his shoulder; Thara Young gave him a dirty look. He shut up.

"Can we trust this will successfully be delivered to our associates securely?", she asked. "That right there is the only copy of the package that can be handed over… and we will have to disappear after this. Whoever are onto us, they are bloodhounds. Could be AIS 5th Directorate, N7, or Public Security Section 9, but if we don't go off their radar soon we're at a serious risk of being compromised."

Ishikawa and Voto'leelas both snorted and started laughing, the former halting the playback. "Oh girl, you have no idea", Ishikawa wheezed.

He opened a comlink: [Heliades-6, Olympus-6, we have datasphere eyes-on on HVT Group Alpha. Sending you the 'metrics.]

[Solid work, Olympus. Uh, excuse me for a moment.]

Ishikawa dismissed the playback into the background, Voto'Leelas pre-empting him by reopening the renders of the Mansion and snap-locating Major Kusanagi.

They acquired the feed just in time to see Kameito twist the wrist of Samuel Akeidashi Junior with augmented ease, forcing the man to his knees, face twisted in pain.

Kusanagi's sleeve's voice was cool and cutting like sharp-edged diamonoid: "Mr. Akeidashi, you should really know better than to grope a woman like me. Whatever silver you had implanted, clearly your cortex could use some more work. Do. _not_. do. it. again." Her voice became sweet. "Are we clear?"

"Aaaaah! Let go, let- **Aaaah!** Yes. _YES!_ Yes we're clear."

"Good." She lot go and stalked away into the crowd, never looking back.

[As you have seen, I had to deal with a momentary interruption. Ishikawa, lock our HVTs down, when they make a move, I want an intercept. You are authorized to shoot their vehicle down if need be. Stack recovery has priority.]

[Shooting them down is seriously gonna escalate our profile, Major, you sure you want to do that?]

[Good point. Correction: Keep an eye on them. Overwatch has clearance to stop them by limb- and Shell-disabling force. No vehicle shoot down unless dire circumstances, but if possible I want them secured for interrogation.]

[Copy that Major, consider it added], the Ops AI came back on the order. The objective window blinked open for a second, accepting a new tasking, sliding into the list; then it compacted and faded away again.

[You have the location of NOVUM SPIRITUS?]

[In just a minute, Major.]

[Solid copy, and good timing: Adriens is starting his speech.]

[Heh. Enjoy it.]

[I will try. Heliades-6, out.]

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** It's been a rough few days, writing-wise, hence the lack of updates - We also decided to write forward a bit more than usual, so we can now hopefully return to a semi-regular schedule.

I also had some need to write something else than Ascendance for a change, which has helped clear and reconcile my writing system and return to this Fic fresh.

One more update, and we'll go into the next chapter "Party Crasher." I'll let the title speak for itself.


	32. Mystery Dance Pt 6

The music had been building for a whole two minutes following the local Mesh ping informing all the attendants that Adriens would hold his evening welcome speech, mixing with the anticipatory chatter of the growing crowd. Servants and drones mixed in, bringing snacks and drinks for opportunity of mesh-transmitted demand, on the ground and in the air.

Then the first new tunes mixed into the background music, combining with the first subtle trigraphs and old-fashioned light beams from a few strategically placed Moving Heads, and the mumbling rose up; heads bobbed above the crowd, the young and anxious looking out for the host of the evening to appear; the more experienced ones searched and found the eye-streams of those who watched from the second floor and had a better overview of the proceedings. A few others launched discrete micro-drones from their palm omnitool inlays, spawning their own livestreams into the local mesh.

That served to give Section 9 a few more convenient eyes to watch the proceedings with, in any case. Raven was watching one of the feeds in her cover persona when Aetheis and the Major smoothly cut through the crowd and came to her side.

[Did anything interesting happen outside?], Aetheis neurovocalized, using her virtual eyes to watch Kusanagi. It was an ultimately worthless gesture, with their cover personalities in Shell control and them being more passengers than anything else, but the instinct was faster and more intuitive than rationality.

Kusanagi allowed the emotive channel to come through strong on her reply, transmitting a mixture of {Relaxed/Unsurprised/Light Anger}: [Some more cover play, meanless small talk about operations and social attitudes and how great we are... Just power players I'd like to call a Xulu Sierra Delta Four on.] Kusanagi dropped an edited XP into Ravens inbox.

 _{Dive}_

The "snapover" into the XP is sudden and abrupt; the outside world and the inside mindscape twists and vanishes, replaced by a new host. The Alienation is a flicker, replaced by synthetic playback certainty and familiarity.

Outside the Mansion. Warm air on exposed skin, comfortably warm through the sun and some minute trickery by way of a phased array infrared emission micro swarm surrounding the air. She knows that because she can hear it talk, and sense the microwave transmitters that power it. A part of Kusanagi reaches out, and sends a request ping; the answer comes immediately. Subverted like anything else. Shutdown at the tense of mental muscles, codes handed over, flagged and attached, stored away in short-term memory, blue-green violin of the west sea.

Satisfaction, professionalism, partition. Filed away, re-assigning threads.

Around her, the probe of Beckenstein's new-mediteran elite talked and schemed, maneuvering around each other , dancing on threads of lies and truths. Daniel Kensu - CEO of Akeisho-Telara Industries, a recent joint-venture in the export of human foodstuffs and wooden furniture. Frank Wolfensdorf - Peltaris, a major exporter of wool-based clothing. Both with several sex scandals linked to them over the decades. Peltaris has been testing the edges of the pleasure and social augmentations market for decades; Peltaris Live has been under investigation several times for possible breaches of customer privacy, and at least one hacking of its databanks by third-party hackers.

Small fish. Danni Yu - local CEO of Lockheed-Martin Technologies. Weapons lover. Extensive collection of war robots he likes to take for a spin on his private grounds. Connected with the local Mafia scene, suspected to smuggle old-generation weapons into the Verge, with the occasional spice of more modern tech. Avatar of Donovan Hock - supposedly a patron of the arts. Big auctioneer. Also a smuggler, and as much involved in the grey and black business of Bekenstein as Adriens, if not moreso.

A part of her wants to call in a Xulu Sierra Delta Four about now and vaporize the location with a tactical fusion warhead, just to spite them. Remind them they are not invulnerable. Then the suppressors kick in. Well, at least they are going to do the second one, in some manner. The diversion is going to be quite something.

{Emergence}

[Yeah. The diversion is going to be something], Raven agreed. Kusanagi only transmitted a feeling of genuine mirth and agreement in return.

Her virtual eyes locked in on an orange highlit person – One of the covert OFIF fighters, unaware the sling is closing around her, slowly but steadily. A phantom smirk crossed Ravens face, a strange entanglement with her actual stoic face, and she felt the muscle memory of bared teeth on her old face.

This was one of those moments where the modern system of having a synthetic Beta-Sim personality play the cover really unfolded its modern beauty – Within that shell of herself and yet not herself, she was free to think and act as she liked, without a risk of giving herself away, instead of swallowing and dampening everything under a mask of training and dampening implants. It was definitely better for personal catharsis and worth the rest of the time when she felt like a strange phantom passenger within her "own" Shell, not in control of its muscles but housed within its skin, and less controlling a body and more playing a game, fingers on buttons and thumb sticks.

 _Is this what video game protagonists felt like back in the day, their AI routines slaved to the player?_ , she asked herself. _Well, okay, probably not._

[And Aetheis did not encounter any... further attention?]

[Not any noteworthy one. I stayed at her side, and we modified her DisplayID a bit... that finally got the message across. Our Rep is spreading and getting into Egos that apparently were more disposed to only being as smart as they liked to be.]

[How idiotic do you have to be to try to to approach Mercs like that? Furthermore biotic and augmented ones with a Cred record way north of dangerous?]

[Bekenstein's social attitude, would be my guess], Aetheis chimed in. [Not the first place, and not the last... you transhumans have an unhealthy obsession with our species.]

[That sounded like a soundbite from _Akariashi_ ] Kusangi pointed out.

[Uh... probably is], Aetheis admitted.

[Ah well, still true unfortenately. And for Bekenstein especially... this place has a reputation for a lot of position- and power-based sexism, from all sides. Supremacy, control, submission... all just another component in their game of "who has whom under thump". And the Elites are old... some of them go as far back as the 21st century, lived through all the shit until now between life extension, cybernetics, rejuvenations, uploading and resleeving... and they brought their attitudes with them.]

[What you call... Meths?]

[Short for Methusalem. Yes, that's what people like to call them degoratory.]

[...Being jaelous of people for being old. A strange concept. One would think you would value your elders and their experience and wisdom.]

[Not when they are old farts who only care about themselves and unlike your Matriarchs often don't care about any benevolence or great philosophical goal] Raven "snorted" over the 'Com.

[I... see.]

The music rose, and the three turned to the stage that had been cleverly molded into the overall arrangement of the massive room. The cadence built, and the voices became silent. Then, an explosion of blue-green trigraphs blinded everyone as they blitzed through the room, and Adriens was there, slipping out of some trigraphic illusion that had hidden him away, striding onto the stage as around him, the lightshow exploded and the music rose to its most energetic point.

"Ah, ah, ah!" The man spread his arms wide, and the applause started up. "Welcome! Welcome, my friends, colleagues, guests, welcome to tonight's evening!" He clasped his hands, and the music subsided together with the light.

Motoko watched him from behind her mask. Adriens was soaking in the attention, reveling in it, and not beneath showing it without any attempt at masking it. _When we are the most content, we are also the most open._

"Tonight we are here to to come together to talk, to make business, but first and foremost, to celebrate." Another round of smaller applause.

"To celebrate the new opportunities that have just opened themselves up to us. With the Skialdi treaty to come into effect in a week, the markets and people of Citadel space become even more accessible to us, and our brands. And with that come new opportunities… new markets… more profit… and enlightenment for those who were left behind."

All three JTF members bit back snorts. Around them, the applause rose to new heights, and a few voices actually cheered.

"Now, it is still a week. Unfortunately. But Adriens Enterprises has already received the first contract requests. So, I have heard, have Seballa Inc., Kalisto, Leonardo, and Blufin Aumento! And many more! Congratulations to them all, you guys deserved it!" He smiled into the crowd, pointing at a few transhumans as he listed their corps up.

"Bekenstein is looking towards a new stage of development. Another renaissance, another step on our path towards a new Golden Age, the dream that has born this planet, and attracted its people."

"Let us work towards this dream, further, forward…. together."

"Thank you, and enjoy the evening."

The applause surged again, and Adriens stood there for another moment, nodding and waving, before he descended the steps and the background music started again, a little more groovy. The man vanished into the crowd.

Kusanagi switched to the renders of the room, and re-acquired Adriens. He had started talking almost as soon as he had entered the crowd, now shaking hands with Emiliano Tzeng, board member of Kalisto, and head of their Social Media Division.

[Major? We have the vault location. It's in his general datavault. He brought it there just after a meeting with our HVT group 1.]

[Solid. We're moving-]

[There is also something else. We just cracked a SecureCom that was in the Distributed Computing Environment of Adriens' office. It's bad quality, but we managed to piece the audio back together and decrypt it.]

[With whom was he talking?]

[We can't say, the EPA was certainly scrambled and proxy-relaid. And the conversation partner itself also scrambled the feed itself.]

[Play it.]

Receiving Video feed…

It was a virtual reconstruction, rendered into the environment of his office. Adriens himself was also a reconstruction - a high-resolution reconstructive avatar, rendered to match the low-resolution data of the original SecureCom call that was still visible underneath.

His conversation partner was a shape of voxels, flickering and undefined at the edges, betraying nothing of the identity. The voice was scrambled, deep, and androgynous, though it still carried emotion.

 **"** **Has the package arrived?"**

"Right here." Adriens procured the datas tick from his pocket. "It will go into my personal datavault in a bit. Is the second party ready for retrieval.

 **"** **Yes. They will contact you this evening."**

"Good, good. And our… arrangement?"

 **"** **We will come back to it once the transition is facilitated. Ascension does not come without effort. You have served us well, and we will remember.**

The voxel cloud twisted slightly, a virtual head maybe tilting to the side, a rolling sea becoming aggitated. The effect was subtle, but through implant introspection, observable.

 **"** **But do not try to undercut us, or sell us out. We are aware."**

Adriens said nothing.

 **"** **And it would have… unfortunate consequences for you."**

"I understand."

 **"** **Good. We will be in touch."**

The voxel cloud dissipated.

[Did I just see that?] Raven asked on the private channel.

[Yup. Frankly, me and Voto have goosebumps from that call. And I am worried about what Adriens will do, or plans to do. He's recording the SecureComs, and his meetings, in a private server it seems, and doesn't quite exercise data quarantine completely.]

[He's creating insurances for himself.]

[Yes. What has Adriens so worried that he creates insurances?]

[Nothing good] Aetheis contributed. [He's nervous. How does that fit into his profile?]

[Well… it doesn't, really. Adriens has been a major powerplayer for four decades at this point; the only reason he doesn't get higher is that he avoids dealing with the rest of transhuman space.]

Voto'Leelas joined in on the discussion: [You know, to me it looks like Adriens is gambling for more power. And he knows he might be backstabbed by Mr. _Dybi'kibbu_.]

[Concurred on that.]

[Let's leave the speculation for later] Kusanagi decided. [We're moving on the package. Get the strike team warmed up, Ishikawa.]

[Yeah, um... _Bos'terisk_!] Voto'Leelas cursed, rapidly manipualting controls on his end.

[Voto'Leelas?]

[Adriens is headed to his office with a bunch of turians. And, nobody of them are local. I got at least one Separatist ID logged in Spectre databanks under association files.] Five face shots from a render dropped into the network, with an ID attached to one. Vellus Quantius Laetus. Associated with Furina Enninus, who had been a member of of a separatist cell involved in a planetary insurrection close to the Howling Wastes 26 years ago.

[Wait, Separatists?] Now Garrus was in the channel.

[This is not good], Bau now voiced. [If Separatists are involved…]

[We knew of joint ventures between respective independence groups on transhuman and turian space. NOVUM SPIRITUS however is a massive deviation from the expected capabilities or cooperation.]

[Spirits. They're planning to use it to launch a new campaign of insurrections and independence movements, don't they?] Garrus voice was herse.

At this side, Saito shot him a glance, turning around behind his own Anti-Armor railgun; the turian had dropped his rifle and was staring into the air. His right claw was twitching minutely.

[Probably. With a cognoweapon of that strength and capability, they could sow chaos, decapitate entire command structures…]

[Subvert leaders, gather intelligence, heck, convert entire armies to their cause!]

[And transhumanity would catch the blame as well.]

There was a moment of silence.

[Major Kusanagi, this is Spectre Bau. _Take it out of the game_. We are moving in now.]

* * *

of Data Package 146 proceeding as planned/timeframe-aligned  
#9803 represents a risk/{reveal/sabotage/undermine}. He must be addressed/mitigated/re-specified  
will be once he has lost his usefulness/utility{AssetEvaluate = Score positive}.  
and Aggregation is moving within nominal timeframe{Allignment drift 16*n^25 scenarios 0.5412-0.6541}.  
good. The Plan will move ahead.  
will have our ascension.[/Satisfaction/]

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 ** _Bos'terisk:_** Khelish, Ikeri Word branch. Informal word that can be translated as "Shitflinger" or "illness spreader". The modern conotation of the word is related to the serious infection risk possed by non-sterilized bio-active material aboard Flotilla spacecraft and colonies, especially the fece of other species. As the quarians take hygene and bio-contamination very seriously, this curse word has quite extreme implifications in quarian culture.  
 ** _  
Dybi'kibbu_** : Khelish, main stem: Ambush predator home to the northern woods and rivers. Known to hunt in opportunistic packs with complex social structure. Back-stabbings and prey stealing are common occurances, earning this animal a reputation as crafty liers and unreliably allies in the quarian vocabulary.  
 **  
EPA:** Extranet Protocoll Adress: The modern 15-position alphanummeric ID used in clearly and uniquelly identifying Extranet members, with sextillions of possible unique adresses.

 **Howling Wastes:** Turian stellartographic name for the constellation where the Relay 314 incident took place. Frontier colony constellation of the Turian Hierarchy. Has suffered increased instability ever since First Contact with transhumanity.

 **Mesh:** The local, decentralized backbone of the Extranet, the Mesh handles localized (kilometer-scale and below) semi-centralized communications, coordination, and Gigabit/person data backbone transmissions. Necessary as regular centralized transceiver solutions cannot provide the bandwidth per person required in modern society. Also hosts other decentralzed data and sensor backbone infrastructure, and the modern Internet of Things.

 **Voxel** : Essentialy, a three-dimensional pixel. Standard resolution/rendering unit of trigraphic systems, but also used to refer to geometric trigraph objects.

 **XP:** Experience Playback, a form of neuro-integrated sensations and feelings recording, translation and playback format for experiencing events from the neuro-sensory perspective of the recorder.

 **Xulu Sierra Delta Four** : Informal transhuman special forces code for an XSD-4 Strike mission.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** After some more consideration, Ascendance is now getting a glossary with each update, introducing smaller worldbuilding pieces and providing some context/reminders of what specific terms entails. This will also be implemented retro-actively over a period of time.

 **A/N(Nick):** The same will be implemented in . These updates would be implemented at the course of few days, so anything that confuses the readers should be explained at the bottom of the chapters.


	33. Party Crasher Pt 1

_Sometimes, a nail really needs a hammer._  
 **SPECTRE [REDACTED], UNOFFICIAL STATEMENT**

* * *

[ JTF OPTEAM ARES - Connecting... ]

Some 10 kilometers inland from Nouveau Venice, the Atlas Corporations Nouveau Venice Aerospace Port etched itself into the landscape, reshaping the low hills and valleys into an even base. Its perimeter and large buildings were a simplistic, white with light grey highlights, most of them massive hangars for holding shuttles, heavy-duty lifters; the rest was a network of wide swathes of tarmac and airfields, covered with the usual congregation of colored lines, way-markings, zone borders, big letters and equally big QR codes sprayed onto the bonded concrete by robots before being covered in a thin polymer-diamond lattice for erosion protection.

One of the places was currently occupied by a largely unmarked, military-grey Kanandu Aerospace Heavy Transatmospheric Assault Vehicle 620 _Nacisi_ , named after an old native american clan. The squat, broad delta-wing was brooding in the sinking sun, its cephaloflage skin only showing the standard dual-format aerospace vehicle registration number as alphanumeric string and machine-readable QR code on the two slanted stabilizer and forward fuselage, and a discrete PMC logo rendered on the sides of the nose and the upper wing surface.  
Otherwise, G-UA-IS-87965, registered to Leopard Armored Interventions out of South Africa, Earth, Sol, just rested on its assigned landing field, an auto-motile power lead plugged into its side from a telescoped hexagonal pillar that had risen out of the tarmac, and did nothing else. The vehicle only had a spider's worth of distributed, wide-angle sensors spread over the forward canopy glistening golden with polarized protective diamond, giving no view of the interior, and if there was any movement inside, the squat, low-center of mass construction of the vehicle swallowed all signs of it up.

The airfield operators just looked, shrugged, and moved on. It wasn't the first time, would not be the least, and the bills were being properly paid by the hour either. The service bots were even less inclined to care. Any external watchers couldn't care because Atlas enforced a strict perimeter around the site, and had its laser defenses swat any unauthorized drones out of the sky DOGS took care of any other physical observers.

"No, I tell you, the Shakira Mk.335 _Atirus_ shreds," Virina Itakela insisted from her position on the rows of heavy, power armor-rated drop seats that had been installed along the walls of the cargo space, the bulk of her own MPS-1880 Mk.245 _Victarius_ restrained by the freshly fabricated crash cage that kept the suit, operator and on-armor gear from getting flung around in the cargo hold if something went wrong with the ICS. In the same manner, the moving seats were padded and laid out as acceleration couches, and had custom-moulded their micromachine padding to conform to the hardsuits now held within

The turian ex-soldier and Spectre Operative had both of her helmets visors, the transparent inner and sensor-studded outer, up, exposing her face and mandibles and leaving her mouth and chin without the somewhat uncomfortable padding and restraints that were supposed to keep the mandibles intact even after heavy impacts.

"Honestly, I prefer not getting ammo block fragments thrown in my face my a "high-performance" shaver," Naomi-1087 replied. "This Mk.21 _Kaskal_ is a pretty good choice as modern-day mass accelerator LMGs go. No loyalty to the new stuff?"

When soldiers had time to kill and nothing to do, many topics were pulled up for discussion. Eventually, it had returned, time after time, to weapons.

"The _Kaskal_ is good - and fucking expensive, and you can forget field-fabrication repair. When it breaks, it's back to the shop to pull the assembly instead of fabbing youself a new whitebox in the field. Besides, the 335 is up to date. 10-kJ/E accelerator, lots of space for a passive heatsink, and support for Takeshi ammo blocks," Armatitius insisted from her position along the rows of heavy, Power Armor-rated drop seats, heavy crash seat, flexible seat holding her comfortably, armored form restrained by the padded, freshly fabricated crash cage. The turian had her helmet on, but both visors raised, allowing fresh air onto her face and keeping her mandibles comfortably free, without the perimeter restraint applied by the visor padding.

"Eh, from field experience it works out no problem."

"You used it how long?"

"12 years. The entire mess in the verge, pretty much, 'till my launch contract ran out and I opted for Section 9. I was part of Covert Action."

"So galactic-sourced weapons wherever possible."

"Uhum. Sure, black markets and corps alike were busy squirting guns where they could, and we could use those when the RepCred allowed it," what she didn't say was how the AIS had also been busy smuggling guns into the area, hoping to bury datapoints of transhuman operations in a slew of false positives and cheap transhuman arms, "but turian guns were popular choices. Worked with both the _Kashal_ and the _Atirus_ , and liked the former better."

"Higher penetration due to the supported flechette profile?", Kaelus Saqara guessed, helmet leaned against his headrest, engaging in a meditative exercise.

"Yes. The gauss accelerator and ram design really makes the ammo shaver pop as a tactical tool. Which we'll need today, considering our adversary selection."

"Armored bio-augmented and lots of 'Bots. Gonna be _interesting_."

"Eh, the scrapheads are overrated as adversaries," Clarke-903 judged from his position, the Bioroid fiddling with his own Phaeston-AE/B2. "Because they're pretty dumb. 'Specially once we hit them with the ECM (he spoke it out as "Ek-em") and cut out their controllers."

"I always thought the AIs were smart?"

"Limited purview, _and_ limited processing power. The more you hit them with hacking attacks, the more cycles they have to task for cyber-defense, especially if the attack is sophisticated. Makes them stupid elsewhere."

"For example, in combat."

"Exactly. No more challenging than your average baseline infantry."

Bau interrupted any further commentary when the entirely robotic hand of his PCS reached up and disengaged the crash frame. As he angled the cage upward, the couch underneath him moved upwards as well, unfolding into a near-vertical position, and dropping the now significantly bulked up Salarian on his armored feet. He clanked on the metal deck as he moved into position.

Batou inferred what he was about to do, and disengaged his seat as well, taking his side, the even heavier Angrboda betraying its heavy weight by stomping about with its full 800 kilos of warfighter.

Togusa clanced at his dashboard clock. Barely 1800. They were moving far earlier than expected. His intestines clenched, and he began nervously working his hands. That was not a good sign.

Bau let his visor wir open, and spoke up loud and clear: "Alright people, we are moving out! Olympus has a hit on the location of NOVUM SPIRITUS, and Heliades is moving in. We're moving early because our second hostile party is already on their way to acquire NOVUM SPIRITUS - And they are turian separatists."

Every turian in the cargo hold growled at once, a deep primal noise of displeasure, teeth grinding against each other, promising violence and bloodshed.

"For obvious reasons, that does not leave us time to position and let the evening progress until our prefered strike time at 1930 hours L-Zu. Check your gear and prepare the Jetpacks. 4 minutes to target." Around them, the VTOL shuddered and began to thrum as the engines started up, atmospheric turbofans drawing in air to heat up with ionic agitators.

"Let's go, Togusa." Batou's armored hand lightly bumped the left shoulder pauldron of the ETOPA-80.

"Wha- yeah," he murmured, hand fumbling for the crash cage release.

[Activating combat environment], his Muse said in his mind. The blissful isolation of in-suit silence was replaced by com channels, unfolding AR overlays, and combat software entering his ARO. The first warm rush of combat implant conditioning flooded into his nerves, washing away the uncertainty and fluttering in his stomach, and he stepped away from the crash seat. Thankfully the ETOPA-80 was almost similar to the -60 model, and he had adapted easily to the gained height and increased mass of the suit.

The voice of the AI pilot appeared in his left ear, the voice render of digital chatter: "Atlas-434 Departure, this is Leopard-69 Heavy, requesting permission to lift."

"Copy 69-Heavy, synching traffic control feeds to you, authenticating…"

"Confirmed, Departure. We have good feeds, good synchs, solid ping, all green. Post-ignition checks are green, power is internal. Ejecting umbilical."

"Copy, 69-Heavy, umbilical release. Securing... You are clear for lift."

"Copy. 69-Heavy is lifting, have a good day Atlas-434."

Underneath them, the floor shuddered as the engines screamed into action, and pushed them away into the evening sky.

Four seconds later, the HTAAV vanished into thermoptic camo.

 **=[ Chapter 8 - Partycrasher ]=**  
 **-| May 20th, 2232 |-**

There were a whole of six interior exists from the big party room; two of them lead to public toilet spaces and as such weren't actual exits. Two others actually led deeper into the public estate spaces and the reserved spaces. The fifth was a service exit, and the final one was the somewhat hidden corridor that lead to the private spaces and the vaults.

None of the exits had direct doors, or posted guards; and the private exit was concealed well enough that they could spirit themselves away. After that it would get harder.

First they had to get there, though.

[ Tasking SoFlow-X Custom... ]

Kusanagi saw motion. The modern transhuman mind, especially one more than 50% made off neurotronic "dryware", could be augmented intuitively and readily accessible in many ways. The custom-modded SoFlow-X App in this case, a jailbroken variant Kusanagi had pulled off a hacker net, allowed her to see movement vectors; easily predicting where people would walk, and where she could cut through a crowd with minimal to no disruption.

Aetheis folded in behind her, smoothly turning her shoulders as she edged around people, and Raven led behind, the later turning around as if looking for someone. Her eyes flickered up to the guards. They still leaned onto the railings, eyes gliding over the crowd and mostly coming to rest on the more illustrious ladies of the evening. Raven and Kusanagi, along with Aetheis, were largely ignored. As usual, the cover Shells had been selected carefully, and with a solid eye for the right mixture of attraction and statistical indifference.

She broke eye contact just as as guard turned his gaze to her; she didn't give him any further indication she had seen him, following Aetheis up the steps and towards the central connector to a second room half-connected on the ground level with the frontal space.

The interior space was decorated more for continuous conversation - tables, comfortable leather seats and barstools had been spread around, a second bar and attached buffet distributed snacks and a variety of beverages including drinks (this one was, as she noted, manned by three humanoid octopus androids with arms on legs, biomimetic cybernetics pretending to be living beings) and on the far side, hidden away behind a wall, was the private entrance, made visible through an AR outline that imposed itself over the environment.

They mixed themselves among the talking guests, cover personalities feigning interest and looking for a possible location to sit down themselves, as the three operators assessed their options.

[Not a lot of people near the entrance. We're going to be noticed.]

Aetheis turned as if to take the room in.

[Two guards above us, watching the events. They're going to call us in.]

[We'll be working with it. Time to strike?]

One of Kusanagi's muses answered on the general network. [Ares ETA is 3 minutes.]

[Ishikawa. Chance of faking out the guards coms?]

[Uuuh… we'd be eyeballing it, not enough data. If they have a code set…]

[Understood. Try it.]

[ ' and synthin' now.]

Akeisheta reported in the background, AI-calm: [Ares ETA is locked at 3:35 minutes.]

[No time to waste. Let's go.]

[Right behind you.]

Kusanagi advised her cover personality, and she moved on an indirect course, trying to obfuscate the kinematic/crowd analysis software that was watching them, as well as the guards. Detection was inevitable, but the seconds they had would count.

The first step. Second. Third. On level with the entrance, above the deeper area that housed the seats.

 _Entrance is 5 meters to the right, 3 o'clock. Proceed along the left side of the four-person group, enter._

Guard 15 meters beyond. Prepare for contact and stealth disable in the corridor.

Ishikawa came back on the Com Net: [And the call is going out… attempting spoof…]

A male voice, Neurovocal-garbled, came through on the tactical net, forwarded by Ishikawa: [Control, this is Overwatch-14, we have three sophonts entering the private entrance at the inner plaza. No invitation tags. Sending biometrics.]

Another voice came back, a synthesized AI-impersonation of a Deep Six controller: [Uh, copy, Overwatch-14, receiving your 'metrics. Locked in, guards are alerted. Out.]

[Understood Control.]

 _Are they buying it?_

The thought's answer was cut short by a soldier in a white-black medium hardsuit with a dull golden edge trim stepping around the corner, one hand easily holding the pistol grip of a white-grey tactical carbine, the other raised in a halt gesture.

"Ma'ams? I am sorry, but this is a private area. I have to ask you to return to the public spaces."

[ Combat Systems on. ]

[/sys/ Activating ]  
[/sys/ Neural Awareness Acceleration: 4x. ]

[ Tango 1 Locking in... ]

As the prickle of the activating combat augs raced through her brain, Ego and Ghost, her eyes zeroed in on the guard. _Takashi Industries 4133 Medium Hardsuit. Light, powered by way of a linear frame exoskeleton, designed for combat cyborgs. Provides median protection against all combat threats, including CQC weapons. Biotics-countering barrier system. Tactical carbine: Overbarrel 30mm Payload launcher, center Assault Rifle with two ammo blocks (most likely loading Disruptor and Anti-Personal rounds), under barrel Less-Lethal Impulse/Shock stun device._

 _Distance 5 meters and closing. Stall._

Her cover personality brought a smile to the face they both wore, formulating the stalling excuse: "Oh, I am sorry, I thought this was…"

In the background, Kusanagi grabbed a set of attack packages, inserted them into their infiltration package, a delivery script, and attached the Net-ID of the merc, broadcasted by his DisplayID beacon, before dropping everything into a discrete port Kara in the distant cyber support section aboard the SSV Fujibayashi Nagato had opened just now.

"No ma'am, how did you not see the-?"

[/sys/ Augmentations online. No faults during Boot. ]

200 milliseconds passed like an eternity, the development dipped into syrup.

The merc stopped speaking in the middle of his exasperated reply, the angry tones leaking into his voice cutting off as the speaker on the helmet de-activated, every synthetic muscle seizing up as the attack software wormed its way into the cyberbrain, first disrupting then shutting down somatic motor control.

Kusanagi blurred into action, synthetic muscles working at military capability instead of the throttled performance of a supposed civilian, countermass generators embedded into the synthetic bone structure of her Shell flaring as they lightened it. She pounced forward in two lighting-fast, tapping steps, and caught the guard as he fell, motor functions locking out and his own DNI's sleep assist functions knocking him into unconsciousness.

"Athame Behold, that was fast," Aetheis blurted out as the events played out in the span of a second.

"Thanks. Warfaces on." Kusanagi accessed the control interface of her own dress, and disengaged the attachment nodes; it fell away easily as her own undersuit disengaged its camouflage systems, turning from the sleeves skin pale blue to a tactical dark grey, at the same time bulking up as the internal material layers activated and the system developed its thermoptic camouflage.

Aetheis removed her own dress, reaching into the interface and activating her own suit, feeling it move and stiffen as it turned from soft biomimicry into a light protective suit.

Meanwhile, Kusanagi was busy ripping the tactical rig off the guard's hardsuit, also loosening the clenched hand around his carbine, before flinging both onto the floor and shouldering the armored man, triggering the reconfiguration of her Smart Hair, which began retracting into her scalp. She looked around.

 _Storage space…_

She send a covert ping. The entire corridor was… a robot hotel, hidden behind extruding wall panels, holding household bots.

 _Clever, and convenient._

Aetheis looked up from her own preparations, checking the thermal clip of her M85C8 Disposable, when a part of the wall moved forward near-silently, rolling across the floor. Then she saw Kusanagi hoist the guard inside, and nodded.

"Right. With that taken care off…" Kusanagi's thigh panels opened up, and she pulled out her gear, including the collapsed _Sequalla'shar_. She held it easily by the sheath, her undersuit having manifested a network of hexagonal ridges to enhance grip, offering it to Aetheis. The asari took it by the grip, and easily snapped it together with a flick of the wrist, hearing the "click" as magnetic contact points joined. A second later, the nanotechnical connectors had mated, and mechanically the joinings were indistinguishable from a solid weld.

Accepting a pouch with replacement thermal clips, Aetheis flipped the blade around with her left hand and attached the sheath, sword grip pointing downward, on her back. The undersuit extended SmartPack attachment growths, and grabbed the sheath, confirming its functionality on Aetheis' ARO. The tugged at the sword grip, testing the flexibility. She nodded in satisfaction. "Good to go."

The Major finished working her shoulders, looted tactical rig attached to her suit, before grabbing the tactical carbine, securing it to the SmartPack unit on the back, where it contracted into its quick-use storage configuration. "The same." They all triggered their helmets.

Catomic smart matter crept from the necks of the undersuit, over their ears, around the chins, over bare heads, forming an organic looking base structure. Over their noses, the density of structures increased, weaving itself into a hard rest, and then the spaces in between filled with a sand-like material flowing like water, dedicated nano-elements released from their storage spaces throughout the undersuit, assembling into the flexible helmet cowls. Quantum Dot Camera Mites assembled into phased-array optics, transmitting the view of the outside world to ARO systems; underneath them Nanofibres wove and hardened into an electrostatic ballistic weave.

[All Callsigns, Heliades has the claws out.]

[Copy, Heliades. Ares is inbound. 3 minutes.]

* * *

 **TECHNOLOGY** **/** **NEUROTECH**  
 **Neural Activity/Perception Acceleration**

Modern Neural Activity Acceleration is a relatively rescent technological innovation in terms of modern acceleration factors, available acceleration time and neuronal fatique and regeneration time caused by the use of NAA technology. The simplest NAA Neuro-augmentations rely on precise (by now also non-invasive) stimulation of neuronal clusters, affording a temporary acceleration in thought speed and perception processing; the greatest limiter here is natural fatique and burnout of accelerated neurons, limiting effective acceleration to around 2 to 3 times normal "speed". More advanced implant solutions use dynamic stimulation, signal amplification and minor epigenetic tweaking in combination with VI-assisted stimulus transaction, increasing acceleration factor, effective use of accelerated time, while decreasing neural fatique and regeneration requirments. Improving on this, DNIs of sufficient density and with advanced synthesis nodes can mirror and buiid upon the effect of combat boosters with similiar effects.

The current standard of neural acceleration is semi-parallel neurotronic acceleration. The base foundation is a major epigenetic augmentation of the neurons - Supercharged myelin sheathing, massively increased neurotransmitter release and regeneration, advanced ion channels, increased gluckose, oxygen and carbon dioxide storees, boosted blood and the creation of separate neurotronic pathways layered in parrael to the existing natural architecture allows, under the aplication of proper control impulses (usualy in the form of micro-fibre laser light of specific frequency, signaling engineered sensing complexes in the neurons) accelerations of 16 times standard neural acceleration, with the assistance of motile Nanotech supervisors. At higher non-natural neuron-percentages of brain matter, this effect can be increased up to theoretical maximums in the range of 20 times acceleration and more; in a similar manner, cybernetic blood and brain cooling by way of heat exchangers and special interwoven heat conductor fillaments allow the brain to perform longer before running at risks of overheating.

The cutting and bleeding edge of tech alike are entirely re-engineered neuronal networks, using complex syntheticaly designed bio- and tech-neurons which have a general higher baseline performance, as well as performance tweaking and prunning of the Ego executed on the boosted Ego Executive Medium. Far more expensive, but promising significantly higher endurance and acceleration speeds.

The best way of accelerating thought speed and perception however, remain synthetic brains - With an associated risk at synthbrain hacking and possible catatrophic breaches of Ego and Ghost integrity, which makes the more hardened and disconnected "classical" neuronal systems favorable with many users.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Catoms** : Modular micro- or nanobots that form functional structures by attaching to each other through electrostatic attraction of nanomechanical grips. Base "material" of fully dynamic smart matter.

 **Cephaloflage** : Bionic camouflage system inspired by cephalopod camouflage capability. Picks up environmental conditions and mimics color, texture and shape to blend into the environment. Can also display static camouflage schemes and customized optical outputs as desired. Not to be confused with thermoptic camouflage.

 **Dashboard** : The "second-closest" of the AROs graphical user interface spaces. Can be likened to a desktop wrapped around the user's head. Unlike HUDs, Dashboards are not point-of-view fixed.

 **"** **Dryware":** Neurotronics deployed in mixture or symbiosis with a "wetware" system of organic neurons, replacing and enhancing neural structure capabilities.

 **ETOPA** : **E** nhanced **T** actical **O** perations **P** ower **A** rmor, a powered Heavy Hardsuit series by the transhuman corporation Calisto Armories.

 **ICS** : Intertial Compensation System

 **kJ/E** (Kilojoule, effective): As eezo-based accelerators can add more kinetic energy than invested as electrical energy (known as the "Akiashi Amplification Effect" in transhuman eezonics terms), the unit kJ/E is used to refer to their actual kinetic energy output rating.

 **L-Zu** (Short for Local Zulu): A special forces particularity introduced in galactic militaries due to the problems in maintaining effective and easily translatable time units, Local Zulu is a circumstance-assigned military time synch.

 **RepCred** : Reputation and Credentials, a mixture of professional capability assessment and public awareness and association of a given entity.

 **Whitebox** : In modern weapons design and tech terms, an environmentally sealed, unitary component of the weapon, such as the accelerator/barrel assembly, ammo shaver, power supply capacitor bank, or onboard computer. Due to the high precision and low tolerances involved in the internals, they are instead integrated and replaced as larger components that can be field-stripped and replaced in one.


	34. Party Crasher Pt 2

The cargo bay of the _Nacisi_ was controlled chaos as JTF Strike Team Ares geared up for war. They had locked down with most of their gear taken off, wearing as little tactical webbing as possible so that the crash cages could fit better; now all of that had to be attached post-haste.

Then there were the jetpacks.

Togusa carefully backed up against the connecting surface of the integrated jetpack unit, dropping back into the shoulder and waist clamps as Batou had shown him several times during the equipment drills; the ETOPA-80's counterparts easily found the guidance rails milled into the attachment clamps, and he let himself fall back into the jetpack before bolts caught catches and the jetpack connected with the hardsuit properly. He wiggled his shoulders and hips as in training, and the jetpack moved with him; nothing felt unduly loose or malfunctioning, an assessment concurrent with the diagnostics entoptics hovering on front of him. His hand swiped through the disengage key, and the padded clamps holding the 'pack in its case released.

The first two steps forward were a bit heavy, his ego settling into the shifted center of mass and associated balance issues; then Togusa found himself and headed to retrieve his chest rig. Lifting it up with one hand, he used both to press it against his armored chest. The automated attachment laches did the rest, snapping into place. _Work shoulders, hop in place, turn around… all good._

He side-stepped around Naomi-1087 and Borma, who were currently busy removing the cargo belting that held their two attached Kenbishi Heavy Industries QPPCS-80E Fuchikoma think tanks they'd use as additional fire support for the operation. Both quadpeds had their Operator pods detached and replaced with additional modular weapons: Fury-A, the foremost one, was now toting a liberal arsenal of gunnery weapons, including a heavy Gatling gun system that could not be mounted in the heavy nose mount. Fury-B now had a Mini-missile MLRS battery as its pod, loaded down with artillery. It was carrying a lot of their heavy-duty Anti-Tank and Anti-Air into the field, to wreck Deep Six Solutions own quadrupedal heavies.

"2 minutes!" the Loadmaster android called out from his position, index and middle finger of the right hand stretched out for everyone to see. The shuttle rocked with a sudden thermal anomaly, sending the ICS scrambling to compensate.

Bau finished his inspection of a bulky, blocky and black-colored salarian MDE-86 Directed Energy Weapon - An actual viable combat laser, only useable thanks to its bulky construction (and thus restriction to power armor), and the weapon enjoyed a RepCred that was less than stellar in the maintenance department - And just on-point for a salarian Merc commander with more money than sense and the species sense of stylish bleeding-edge tech.

He casually stowed the weapon on the side of his own jetpack, where the flank SmartPack extended small tentacles to mechanically secure it, then dropped into a perception-accelerated implant trance, working with his PAVIs and the single transhuman muse he had bought and installed some eight years ago, finishing his briefing package.

He re-emerged, and opened the TacNet link on the Priority-1 channel, also dropping the link to the briefing Vir: [Alright people, accelerate and drop in. We have some 5 minutes; let's get the final details in!]

He re-accelerated to 6 times, easily maintainable on his augmented brain, and waited.

Togusa thumped his own controls up, feeling the buzz as the world slowed down, inputs stretching and his body turning into syrup, far slower to react than his hypercharged mind; then his vision dropped out in a simple render, black pixels growing and extinguishing reality, and he dropped back and away into the Vir, leaving his muse to run the Shell for the moment.

The virtual reality was simplistic - a black space only given context by a brightly growing floor of gridded points of blue-violet light, extending above and below into a 3D grid of less bright violet voxels. The avatars were similarly simplistic, if still somewhat realistic renders, illuminated by some unseen far-above light source that illuminated the environment without being seen itself. It also smelled sterile, and there was no sound outside of the rustling of avatar clothes.

Considering how many resources just a base sim drew, and that this was locally hosted, it was more than adequate for a quick briefing.

Bau stood on the far side of a central open space, arms crossed behind his back in an all-recognizable military gesture; the rest of the strike team manifesting one by one over the span of a two in-Vir seconds. Three turians, three transhumans, six bioroids and two androids, plus the two Fuchikomas; the controlling AIs of the remaining strike unit holding in the background.

Suddenly, they were in a digital blue wireframe of the TAVs cargo bay, and it zoomed inward, through the avatars, and into the center of the free space between them. Terrain sketched itself out under it, and between their feet to the virtual horizon, together with a red trajectory, a beacon of lines and a hexagon marking their destination, and a variety of metrics flooding the space, layer after layer of information polling atop each other. Two big clocks also began counting down above them; one ran in real time, the other in accelerated scale; a smaller one detonated the L-Zulu time.

Apparently Bau liked dramatic presentations and briefings, Togusa concluded.

The virtual trigraphs zoomed towards Adrien's estate, and in on the large public complex. The familiar wireframes of the interior appeared, now filled with the tiny stick figures of people. Dozens of them were red, and three were a familiar allied green. Nine figures, and a vault room, were painted in the orange that designated priority targets, symbols hovering over their heads.

"Heliades is moving on the large Datavault, where Adriens has decided to store NOVUM SPIRITUS. That is the good news."

The graphic zoomed out, centering the entire core estate, including the private mansion, between them. New graphics and datapoints appeared. Arrow graphics, population predictions, the statistical visualization of predictive simulations and oracle engines. "Bad news 1 for us: That means we have to worry about reinforcements from the private estate, including Deep Six Solutions Raptor-9 team. Two elite Platoons with lots of robots in support. Once they roll up, our time will run out, and if they lock in on Heliades, they are toast. Our role, and that of cyber support, is to pre-empt that as long as possible and set up some way of neutralizing them between us, the snipers, and our air support."

"Bad News number 2." Nine wireframe boxes appeared in the air, orange lines connecting them with the nine figures. Faces appeared, first wireframes, then overlaid with trigraphic fidelity; there were four transhumans and five turians, separated into two groups. "Both of our parties of interest are on-site. All nine HVTs are considered shoot-to-disable on-site. Do not allow them to escape or destroy their stacks; we need at least one of either group to interrogate. Pin them, tag them and bag them. Shackles on arms, legs, and for the transhumans, restraint clamps." A new holographic item manifested itself over the central space, a vaguely spine-like device of black metal. It sprouted a set of standard interface ports.

"In terms of restraining... means everything up to headshots for transhumans, correct?" Virina Itakela asked.

Borma replied: "Yes. What you cannot hit under any circumstances is the neck area. That's where the stack will be. You hit that with a few rounds, and diamond shell or not it's broken. Best we get is static imagery and a broken Ego. Worst-case, we get nothing."

"Understood."

"Bad news number 3 - They're already moving on the vault. So we're going to split up and come to the aid of Heliades, kind off. New mission objectives are, in order: A.) Crowd control. Ares-1" Bau nodded to the transhumans mostly, "moves into the public space, hunts and secures HVT Group Alpha where able. Ares-2 and Ares-4 run control and diversion outside, and lock down Deep Six Solutions, smooth and steady, then mop them up between heavy weapons and snipers. Ares-3 will head to intercept the separatists near the vault, where possible."

"Understood. That means we'll be pushing through heavy resistance."

"You have your gear - use it. And remember, we have cyber support, especially in our opening moves. Use that to our fullest advantage. Disrupt coms, lock out weapons, every nasty trick in the book. We're not here to play fair, Gentlesophs. We are here to play dirty."

Bau looked around. "Any more questions?"

"No Sir!"

"Good. Prepare for drop. 1:30 real time."

The virtual reality collapsed, and Togusa switched off his own perception acceleration, sighting in relief as the unnatural Egostate vanished.

Batou looked over the operators, seizing them up. They were steeled, but not… properly motivated. Not psyched.

He opened a private channel with Bau: "Spectre Bau, Sir? Permission to, ah, motivate the troops?"

"In what style, Commander?"

"Rangers."

There was a moment of thoughtful silence.

"Permission granted, Commander."

"Aye-aye, Sir." Batou turned to the larger cargo room, watching as the last situational gear was affixed to the tactical webbing: The heavy pre-fabricated arm and leg restraints, and six Restraint clamps.

"Ares, give me an Orah!"

Everyone looked at him, standing in front of Fury-A. The Turians were the first to snap into it, understanding his intention.

"You heard me. Orah!"

" **Orah!** "

"I can't quite hear you!"

Togusa angled his helmet on the side, thinking. His hand worked.

" _ **Orah!**_ "

 **"** Now that is better, Ares!

" _Over the DZ in one minute, repeat one minute!_ "

"Ares! Battle trance on and drop positions! Let's do this! Ooorah!"

" **Ooorah!** ", the transhumans thundered as one, the turians besides them adding on: " **Pre cue csasea!** "

They all stood up and lined up in two rows, in the clear space before the Fuchikomas, side by side. Togusa too a deep breath and lined up next to Bau. The salarians faceplate locked with his, then a private channel opened: "Are you ready, Togusa?"

"As ready as I'll be." He took a deep breath, settled into the calm wash of the Battle trance as it was induced by his implants, washing away the feeling in the gut that had just re-surfaced, feeling the instinctual extension into his NISS and NIKB links and the knowledge contained therein, and the long training sessions in real life and Vir he had undergone between Batou, Borma, Saito and the Major, all of them drilling him in particulars. He remembered something Batou had told him once: "I will adapt."

Bau nodded. "Very good. I have trust in you, Ares-1-4"

Togusa nodded again, siletnly.

"20 seconds! Eyes on the estate!", the pilot AGI called in. "Good luck!"

 _We don't need luck_ , Bau thought. _I make my own fate._

* * *

"So far this evening has been rather uneventful, you know?" Ubertino Bruna leaned against the wall, carbine easily held in one hand, the left casually hanging by his side.

"Be thankful for that, you know. It could definitely be worse." Angela's ARvatar turned back to him, beautiful and timeless as ever, wearing her usual white dress. The Class-II AI was his assigned SigTech, robot supervisor and semi-personal companion, carried around in the reinforced computer array secured underneath his Smartpack, and controlling the assigned fireteam of bipedal Boston-Akamashu combat robots and the two hidden-away HOUND-R Combat Rovers.

"Hmm. My pity for those running patrols outside, or standing guard at the main festivities. Always gotta stand at attention, boss will be breathing down their neck, and zero spare capacity for anything but observe the party guests."

"Not that the latter is a bad thing" Angela observed, smirking, "at least according to some. Samuel was quite happy to be assigned as controller for the terrace area."

"No surprise to hear that. Even less so considering his Extranet history..."

"Oh? Is there something I shou-" Her image suddenly flickered out, ripped out of the world without the usual fanfare.

The world turned to syrup as his systems went automatically hot. A Know manifested in his implant ports. [Proximity alert, unknown person, gun in the-]

-He whirled around, left hand rising up, catching the angled grip of the carbine, stabilizing it as the magnetic grips locked in with a "snap" that pulled his fingers in tight and into the correct position. His vision widened as his visual augments kicked in, giving him a new view expanding into 270° of perfect vision, even as an orange-red warning graphic and distance indicator appeared in his ARO and a red line traced towards his head-

[-open.] He locked in on the figure, phantom eyes "focusing" as his new holographic vision eradicated the weaknesses of normal human eyes, acquiring motion vectors, predicted weak points, kinetic barrier strength, and tactical implants piped him options. The numbers were bad, and shrinking, the metadata picture collapsing in on a single asymptote - His death.

His index finger shifted to the trigger, and he felt the readiness of the accelerator to fire-

-Five rapid shots slammed into his head, correcting smoothly for his attempt to evade by shifting his body and head around. The first ricochet off the side of the helmet barrier, kinetic vector entirely absorbed and rebounded in a flash of entropic photons, tiny fragments of designer carbon-tungsten material spreading into the air in a red smear of plasma, slamming into wooden walls, blaster and wall lights. The second, third, fourth and fifth sabot slammed straight-onwards into the barrier, the spin-stabilized projectile pushing into the momentum-sapping field, triggering a bright flash that forced part of the mounted imaging array into protective lock-down, compensating by using chest plate and heatset cameras. He staggered and weaved, trying to avoid the auto-targeting system of the gun.

He came back just in time to see the flickering grey figure that had attacked him, bursting out of thermoptic camouflage, raise her foot, and see the heat flash as cybernetically integrated effectors fabricated the near-invisible shape of an Omni-blade without its usual orange trigraph.

The last coherent thought besides the predictive data that flashed through Ubertino Bruna's mind was: _Fuck._

The blade connected with his head. There was a penetrating "slap", a dull piercing pain, a moment of flickering confusion…..

Kusanagi watched as the guard was catapulted to her right from the hit with the foot-anchored omniblade, her digital intrusion reaching out and finishing the process of disabling the man's hard- and dryware, deactivating the dead man's switches and alert functionalities; his AI companion had already been disabled, her executive mandate suspended and through this, effectively rendered unconsciousness.

At her side, Raven easily caught the falling Bruna, slowing his fall and laying him down in a clatter of gear on flooring before bringing her pistol back up and scanning the room.

A two-part stairway round up into the second floor, topped by a high ceiling and light windows at the very top, a spiraling chandelier of titanium white with outward-facing OLED elements illuminating the staircase and room below. To their left, the staircase room expanded upwards into a slice-shaped tea room that ended in a round outlook of sorts, a now-closed glass front opening onto a sun-shaded terrace. Groups of leather couches and chairs had been arranged around a couple of big wood-and-glass tables, and another three guards stood at the ready, their assigned robots standing in pairs at the edges of the room, apparently powered down.

 _So Adriens was expecting some trouble…_

All three guards had finished turning around, one of them already bringing his carbine up, firing a burst that dug into Ravens barrier and Kusanagi's shields, shouting out loud: "Motherfucker!"

There was a biotic feedback and gravitic tug as Aetheis appeared in a warp of space-time, completing an easy sideways flip, left hand drawing the _Sequalla'shar_ in an easy reverse grip. The guard shifted his carbine to her, jet-boosting to the right and lowering himself onto his knees in a slide to take cover when she pushed off in an easy, almost augmented-looking stride, and brought her momentum into the Charge.

With a fresh tug of warped space-time, the asari catapulted herself through the air in a low, vibrating noise that thrummed through the air and inside the Shell's synthetic bones, painting a trail of blue-violet photons through the air and towards the guard. She flashed back into visible form in a bang if displaced air, left arm coming forward in a swing, body turning, and pistol hand drawn in close.

The _Sequalla'shar_ flashed as the asari pushed her power into its core and up the resonators, the warp field agitating the air into plasma as it charged to lethal disruptive field strength; then the edge of the blade met the guards helmet in a smooth, sideways strike.

The kinetic barrier triggered, and flashed as destructive interference destroyed the carefully projected field harmonics of the metric, voicing its protest in a wave of flickering photon field that spread over the helmet and neck along the guidance metric. The blade hit the edge of the helmet. A short jet of plasma and a fountain of hot particulates shot off as the surface composite, underlying ablative foam, and ceramic armor of the head plating was flash-agitated and rented apart by the warp field.

Aetheis needed less than 40 milliseconds to completely cut the helmet in half, the blade meeting no resistance at all as it destroyed the molecular bonds in its path with shearing vectors of gravity and metric warping. As Aetheis finished her cut, a smoking helmet top slid to the side and fell on the floor, the cross-cut of the cyberized brain neatly exposed inside the glowing framework of the helmet.

Cat-like, her feet landed on the floor, lightly pushing the falling Shell aside, all the while bringing her heavy pistol up in a casual commando shooter stance, firing at the second guard as she easily brought her sword arm up and used her hand joint to brace her shooting hand, sliding into cover with a casual biotic burst of momentum.

The leather couch was torn up as the second guard fired shots, the third converging towards a flank - Which was when Raven burst into motion herself, catapulting herself into the air in a burst of biotic aura and a snap of compressing artificial muscle, splintering the floor underneath her feet as she pushed off. She pulled her left arm back, skin panels opening through smart fabric ports in the undersuit, exposing the dedicated nanoblade extruder installed there; a first of the sturdy diamond blades snapped into place from the internal magazine; at the same time she easily fired shots at the guard, seeking to make the Merc seek cover and expose himself more.

The Merc was having none of it. Recognizing she had reduced her mass, he raised his tactical carbine and fired the less-lethal plasma-impulse projector installed underneath the main accelerator and payload launcher. The plasma wave hit her mid-on, crashing into the kinetic barrier, slowing her down.

The guard was clearly a full-body cyborg: He had fired the LLPI one-handed, and brought his other up; there was a flash of white-red and a big infrared signature as the arm-mounted omnitool began creating a heavy, fast-fabricated omnishield, effector beams projecting shield material as its precursor materials were rolled through the internal fabrication system.

Slowed and her parable shortened by the impact of the LLPI, Raven made a graceful landing, lunging forward for a committed-looking stab; the shield rose up to meet it. Doped carbon racked across interlocked polymer and metal, sparks and flakes of omnishield material shooting into the air. The guard absorbed the attack, then bashed with his shield, standard-issue jump pack coughing up a short impulse to give him forward momentum. She dodged backwards, bending her knees as she made her second step, compressing artificial tendons and muscle. She catapulted herself into an overhead strike, had the guard dodge as he ducked underneath his shield. _Gotcha._ Her left hand closed around the edge of the shield, feeling the hard outer edge and the slippery inner field where the kinetic barriers edge metric provided resistance to her fingers.

Her left foot found perching on the shield, and she began flipping herself over, legs providing momentum to fling her about the wrist.

The guard saw the move, tried to react by "blowing out" the omnishield. Raven felt the change in the metric as the stabilizing barrier and mass-lock field turned into a kinetic effector, preparing to blast the solid components of the shield outwards, together the needle staps of the omnitool effectors as they fractured the material, and she let go. The components of the shield blasted outwards, barely missing her feet as they rose over her head, approaching the apex of their trajectory.

And as she completed her role, Raven easily sighted in the digital crosshair of her pistol and pulled the trigger, keeping her arm straight and correcting her aim as she swung to the ground. _This is so stupid_ , it shot through her mind in realization as she felt the tensing and relaxing of the microfibres woven throughout her muscles, tinier artificial muscles controlled by a DCE intelligently absorbing, distributing and countering the recoil of the gun. Her ARO showed the impact analytics and barrier strength, sensors measuring the remote "radiation" of wave emissions of dark energy that were created by any mass effect field, computing the barrier strength, time to field decoherence, and power remaining in the hardsuits capacitors.

On her sixth rapid shot, the barrier broke; the seventh drilled a massive hole into the head armor, ejecting ceramic powder, disintegrating debris and some molten slag in combination with a plasma jet as the sabot disintegrated on impact; the eighth finally reached into the brain. She fired two more, and watched the Merc starting to relax as his brain stopped functioning properly. Her systems acknowledged , the crosshair flickering with a big red X; signaling that a lethal hit had connected. One guard remaining. She cued her right arms omnitool, inserting an item into the manufacturing que.

She pulled her legs in and played with her mass distribution through her biotics, weighing down her legs as they flipped overhead and she pulled them in, bracing to absorb the force of the jump. Suddenly four times pseudo-heavier, she used the increased acceleration created by simple gravity acceleration to bring her legs back under herself, coming down into a roll.

There was a mental beep and somatic pseudo-tug as the assembler finished its work on the uFRPG - coming out of the first roll, she called up her targeting system, used the TacNets Sensor Fusion Dataspace to acquire and target the third guard, and launched the flesh-fabbed micro-RPG. The projectile was dumb by any modern standard; in the same manner, it used highly stabile plastic fab-plosives, extrudable under the temperatures created by flash-fabrication, instead of the modern high-performance nanomaterial explosives. A special micro-granulate made up the solid rocket fuel.

The projectile screamed across the room and exploded against the kinetic barrier of the last remaining guard; three shots from Aetheis later, he dropped dead as well.

[Bots are engaging on auto, watch it!]

" _Athame'sa itari azure!_ ", Aetheis cursed, ducking underneath the swing of the combat robot that had suddenly started moving from its at-attention position behind her; the _Sequalla'shar_ flashed a painnfull-looking plasma-white and was rammed tip-first through the chest armor and into one the fuel cells. The robot made an electronic sound of displeasure, distorting into electronic noise as one of its high-density power cells began shorting out, sending feedback spikes through the main bus. Aetheis pulled the short warp sword out to the right side of the bots torso, and send it toppling over with a biotic pulse that dented in its chestplate in.

Ducking under the muzzle of a big two-barreled MG mass driver, a single flashing move of the _Sequalla'shar_ cut the barrel in two; a second swing cut off the bot arms, and she fired her pistol twice, and then cut the torso section apart with her third swing from the right shoulder to the left hip joint. The ceramics of the blade perfectly isolate her from the electrical currents that were liberated as she breached the core energy storage units.

" _Thu-screeeeeoooow-thamp!_ " A seeker barreled through the confines of the room, found another guard robot, and blasted it apart, ceramic plating and robot components flying about, destroying furniture and pinging off barrier fields. In the air, combat drones wavered and crashed as Kusanagi's attack software and behind them, her Ego, buried into their coding, overrode safeties and triggered onboard contingency functions. Kusanagi lowered the carbine and switched back to the main accelerator, moving in while hugging the wall as cover.

She then managed to breach through one bot's attempts at deterring her cyber-attacks, importing and installing new software while switching higher-order thinking to remote access and substituting it with her own Exocortex at the same time as tagging it as temporary friendly for Raven and Aethei. The combat machine promptly ripped an arm off a fellow robot before it had realized the switch of sides, twisting and breaking the construction at the shoulder joint and with no disregard for the myomer warranty, boosting its strength. Then it shouldered and fired its MG, heavy 14kj disruptor rounds tearing into the other machines.

After two seconds, there was silence. Raven slapped an anti-armor breacher on the last standing robot, and strode on, before blasting it as well. "Well, that was nice" she remarked sardonically, triggering the vent on her pistol before holstering it, expanded, on her right hip, and starting to rip a second tactical rig and carbine off a killed guard. Aetheis caught the cue and did the same, selectively liberating some heavier heatsinks in their dispeners and snatching a _Česká zbrojovka Uherský Brod_ EVO-90 heavy submachine pistol off a guard's hip holster. She exposed the heatsink port, checking the seating, and then checked the ammo block as well, nodding at the sight of a dark blue-marked disruptor 'block.

They all looked up when they heard the sound of jet engines in the distance. "Right on schedule."

* * *

The party had been great so far. Good drinks, some dashing guys to look at and maybe take for a night later on, a game of masks and conspiracies.

Alena Miralena loved it. This, and her hobby, made life worthwhile.

Well. At least for the time being. Iddly she looked at an expensive piece of tessellated artwork that was definitely salarian, judging by the complex permutation of fractal patterns and the expensive holographic metamaterial that made it up. She opened a context menu, and called up the appropriate app.

A puzzle opened itself. _Sheranin then, it seems. Hmmmm…. Almost worth it. It would be a challenge._

The roar of something overhead ripped her from her thoughts. Exocortexial augs and ingrained skills, even if rusty, identified the sound. Baffled atmospheric plasma engines, approaching close overhead.

She allowed herself a small smile and turned towards the interior, not looking back. Around her people turned towards the sound, eyes looking on something skyward. She caught the tiny reflection of black figures backlit by blue light on a young man's pilot sunglasses, augmented visual cortex compensating for the warping caused by the coating, and she heard the hoarse snarl of jetpack engines.

 _This evening is interesting indeed._

Behind her, the screams started as the first shells airburst, and spread cones of glittering smoke all over the outdoor terraces.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Boston-Akamashu:** Transhuman hypercorp specializing in (combat) robots. Based out of Japan and North America, Earth, Sol.

 ** _Česká zbrojovka Uherský Brod_** **(ČZUB)** : Czech Arms Factory, a firearms manufacturer based out of the European Stellar Federations home territory on Earth.

 **Effektor** : (Omnitool-mounted) eezonic projector system used for effecting changes in the control sphere of the omnitool by way of mass effect geometries.

 **"** **Pre cue csasea!"** : "Die for The Cause!", turian battle cry and motto of any turian serving the cause of the turian people.

 **NISS** : Neuro-integrated Skillset, a form of quick-load, instant-accessible external memory augmentation that networks with the native skill and memory centers. NISS is especially useful for situational skill integration and afterwards, removal. Synergistic integration is the biggest obstacle to (advanced) NISS usage.

 **NIKB** : Neuro-integrated Knowledge Base, a sister format to NISS specifically used to transport and install knowledge near-instantaneously. NIKB can turn people into semi-proficient experts in an area. Like NISS, synergistic integration is the biggest obstacle to (advanced) NIKB usage.

 **Seeker** : Intelligent, scramjet-propelled Micromissile with advanced self-guidance. Gauss-launched, Seekers have in many ways replaced conventional grenades and even other kinetic weapons to a degree, especially due to their high lethality and indirect fire capability.  
 **  
Sequalla'shar** : Asari short warp sword, designed for fast and maneuverable cutting and stabbing. One of the prefered tools of the Kvavelisian school of commando training and biotic practise as it marries well with their doctrine.

 **Vir** : Short for Virtual Reality. Notably, in Virs, the hosts Ego is hosted externally to the VR-generating environment. As such, contrast with Simulspace or "Sim".

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** Well well, look what I found in the advent calendar today... a special thanks goes to Fluoxetine who managed to Beta this piece despite time pressure.

Otherwise... not much to say this time around. Except that it feels good to be back to writing action, and that this time, it will definitely be a larger action scene overall, at least spanning two chapters.

We hope you enjoyed this. Discussion and feedback is as always, always welcome.


	35. Party Crasher Pt 3

"Strike is 30 seconds out", their assigned Ops AI reported in the cochlea shunts of Saito and Garrus.

"Kai, sort final target list and assign", Saito ordered the Combat Management AI riding on his Hawkeye, setting his shoulder against the stock of his faithful M295 sniper railgun. He pulled the polymer magazine from the well, and checked the top two 12mm sabots with their 9.5mm Flechetes, gleaming rounds locked in position to feed. The contact faces of the sabot were unblemished and clean. With a nod, he re-settled the magazine, and pulled the charging handle on the right back the short bit until it hit the first catch.

The electronically actuated bolt cycled, stripping the round, settling it in the initial accelerator.

Another element on Saito's HUD changed to green, signaling combat readiness. The left side became dominated by a growing table of targets, as his vision populated with red diamonds. He knew Garrus was seeing the same, in orange and blue.

"Final go-over", Saito said, looking at Garrus. "Guards on the roof are first, _Shaklar esker_." He smoothly switched to kesheon, advising their target practice. Rapid, singular shots to the head or chest processor/power area, for terminal effect.

" _Shaklar esker, te geras at uvidis-char_ ", Garrus confirmed, his Combat Assistant VI tagging the guards on the roof with the appropriate designation.

"Next, we interdict the QRF from the far end of the compound, and keep the guards there suppressed or disabled. _Shaklar makev, Shaklar miresev_."

" _Shaklar makev, Shaklar miresev, te geras at elev ak kurise_."

Saito smiled. It was almost like old times, with Kearyon and the old guard. Or Smith. His smile dropped.

 _Just like old times._

He settled his scope on the first guard. There were five on the roof, spread out. A transhuman presence, a bit more discreet than the martial shape of the blocky, heavily armored combat robots, and a sign of wealth too.

The intermix was still 1 to 4. More than enough for what Joint Task Force was about to do… also.

[Ares is 10 out. Stand-by, stand-by.]

Garrus brought his MSR-452 Mod 127 _Iskara_ up, armored fingers gripping the turian grip easily, extended claw shoe resting on the guard. His ARO reconfigured to sniper mode; the monocle's overlays expanding into his vision, and the patched controls for the _Iskara_ on the left edge. His left claw twitched minute as his Subcutaneous Interface relayed nervous signals to the virtual hand in his ARO. He reached out to the safety control and swiped it to the right.

Helmet pressed against the customized rest of the stock, he felt and heard the subtle whine as both transformer and capacitors filled with energy.

He moved the gun, settling the crosshair of the digital scope on his first target. "On."

 _Breathe in._

[Hold scope - Authorize fire mission.]

Garrus pulled through the trigger. Turian script flashed over the center of the crosshair:

FIRE MISSION AUTHORIZED

 _Breathe out._

In the background, the sound of engines swelled.

"Stand-by… 3… 2.. 1."

On the rooftop, the guards looked around. One of them glanced skyward, then his helmet snapped upwards, locking in on the approaching vehicle. His own robot squad snapped up as instinctual DNI controls kicked in their own routines.

Saito pulled the virtual trigger in his mind that released their guns.

The _Iskara_ 's fire computer received the fire release clearance through the fibre-optic network they had spliced together as they set up, and pinged the fire control chip.

Inside a rotary 12-chamber drum, chamber number 7 flexed its magnetic coils, gripping a recently shaved 4*30mm flechette of tungsten-carbide encased in diamond and mantled with a ceramic metamaterial sabot, and accelerating it forward. The sabot passed from rotary storage cylinder into the first gauss accelerator, gaining velocity, before it entered the primary railgun accelerator and influence of the countermass fields and was abruptly accelerated from less than 50 meters per second to Mach 10.

At the end of a 170 millisecond journey, 42 effective kilojoules of kinetic energy impacted a triggering kinetic barrier. The very tip of the flechette turned to plasma immediately, but then the true power of the flechette revealed itself - with its kinetic energy focused on the small frontal area of the flechette, a first core managed to penetrate deeper into the mass effect metric. Metamaterial structures reacted, and the hardened core of the flechette left the mantle of the kinetic penetrator.

From the remote distance of their nest, the SpotterBot measured the faint but detectable waveform events created by the kinetic barrier interaction, and assessed the results; Garrus saw the bright blue X surrounded by a circle that marked a penetrative barrier hit, saw the dip in overall barrier strength in the same moment, then the dark blue double-X of a lethal hit. The spray of ceramics, cerametal, diamond shards, brain matter and red human blood splattered on the next guard, which Garrus was already sighting in as the woman recoiled.

Around her, the combat robots smoothly re-prioritized, side-stepping into cover… relative to the remaining guards.

One of them was hit squarely in the side of the head by Saito's own 9.5mm flechette; freed of its sabot, the heavier projectile punched through the barrier field and into the helmet. The braincase blew apart in a mess of implants, flesh and Shell exoskeleton, spraying across the escorting robots. The machines shook their heads with rather organic gestures to clear the dirt from their faceplates, raising their guns to engage the still-standing transhuman guards, and a squad of robots that had not been subverted.

 _Breathe in… hold…_

Garrus pulled the trigger again. The _Iskara_ smoothly kicked into his shoulder, the drawn-out impulse of the lightened projectile as it gained momentum pushing the assembly back instead of the sharp kick found in old chemical guns. Bright blue X, dark blue X in circle.  
" _Keta ozu, rozu shaklar esker_ ".

" _Ateka! Keta razu, ruzu shaklar esker!_ "

He shifted the crosshair, fired twice more in rapid succession, staggering the combat robot. Garrus shifted his aim upwards, fired once to shatter the head unit, then re-centered on the highlit NPU unit in the robot's chest and fired one last time; the robot "stiffened" as the control to its myomer musculature and endoskeleton servos cut out, and toppled over ever so slowly,. There was a spray of gravel when it hit the roof, Garrus noted as he fired again, already snapping to new targets.

Besides him, Saito was working his way through the list of heavies. His first two shots broke the barrier, before annihilating the head of the singular guard in a heavy hardsuit. A sweeping series of snapshots, merging computer and cybernetic precision, sent guided hypersonic projectiles downrange in quick succession. The railgun whired and hummed as it worked, adjusting its barrel deflection by arc milliseconds, transfering targeting and guidance data to intelligent electronics.

The last three enemy bots crashed down with armor-piercing high-explosive 9.5mm smart projectiles slammed into their chest area, then blew apart in sprays of fire, plasma, hydraulic fluid, alloy components and armor ceramics. Around them, the hacked robots dove for cover as the shrapnel scythed across the roof, shattered diamond and high-duty alloys killing or disabling more than one before they had a chance to seek full cover. The fourth bot hit by Saito exploded spectacularly when a cascade reaction sent its entire high-density storage system into meltdown, blasting a chimney appart and raining more debris on the guards below.

"Recycle!" The _Iskara_ ejected a steaming heatsink, hissing as nitrogen coolant vented from the bay; with a clatter, the autoloader withdrew a fresh one from the eight-'sink magazine integrated into the weapon, and slotted it into place with a click. " _Bara_!"

[New Targets assigned.] The orange list of contacts refilled with electronic beeps, the HUD filling with new symbols, and a tattered line of pixels pulled his eyes and with them, his crosshair, to his first target.

" _Agera_!"

* * *

30 seconds earlier and some 350 meters away, Ishaki Fost was staring at a big holographic screen and itching to pull up the current social media feeds. Staring at hyper-reality holograph of party guests got boring, no matter how much you could take in the eye candy of hinting chests and moulded physiques.

He bit back a sigh of frustration and glanced at his own ARO. Still 30 more minutes to go until the end of shift. Then he could graduate from the comfortable but not very relax-supporting chair to one of the couches in the rec area, from a Combat Flexsuit to comfortable Smart shirt and trowers, and some quality entertainment.

He glanced back at the perimeter screen. Still nothing. He looked back to the cams. The visual diagnostics indicating what the machine vision analytics saw were all nice greens and blue, mixed with some yellow - but no warning oranges or reds.

The warning beep that signaled a "snap arm alert" was a completely unwelcome intrusion. The screen was in front of his eyes, top of the holographic layers, immediately.

"Sir, we have a Red-4 on the roof."

"Report!" Commander Decran snapped immediately.

"Nothing more. Red-4, on the roof. No changes on the TacLink, or camera-"

"Snapfire Blue Niner!", she ordered immediately, and for a moment, he froze. That is imposs-

He heard the left door to the control room hiss open, and a gear snapped forward a position in that moment. He was clueless. Was it time to be sorry? Should he empty his mind, as they advised before an upload? Or dive beneath the table, get out of the obvious line of fire of a collapsing killbox-  
The thunder of a fully automatic LMG cut of his further thoughts. He caught some of the events in the reflection of the holographic glass, its matte property disrupted by the bright plasma flashes and ablation trails. Four combat robots were pushing in through the door, already dividing the room apart into fields of fire, and firing on everyone inside. Jerome caught a burst in the chest, and warm fluid splashed against Fost's head.

 _So this is it._ He felt strangely serene.

The horse kick that punched him in the chest through the chair didn't even feel painful. He coughed, and more blood landed on the sealed control table and holographic screen, mixing with the ejecta of tissue from his chest.

His muscles lost strength, and he started sliding off the chair and sinking onto the table. For a moment, he saw the interface flicker, indicators of the digital struggle underneath… then finally, merciful darkness overtook him. He didn't feel afraid. It was too late for that.

There was a roaring sound, and he felt himself move as his body seemed to vanish away, and ahead was a light…

 _Content…_

* * *

As she glided towards the ground of three bright blue-orange lances of plasma exhaust, Naomi-1087 watched the opening shock ripple through the guards outside the mansion. Robots turned on guards were they stood or walked, spoofed IFF transmitter codes locking out guns for the vital second it took to switch them over to unrestricted fire, safe for those few savvy guards who had kept the safeties on IFF-off by default.

Then they got hit too, specifically targeted Lockdown Kaos'ware slipping into their hardsuit and body somatic controls, unpacking after passing through the prepared backdoors, and exposing them more as they desperately waited for auto-purging scripts to flush and reset the DCEs.

QD-4533 and EK-0429 were the first on the ground, the two heavy-chassis Androids in their Assault Hardsuits taking the ground, splitting the lawn up into overwatch zones. They held the ground, not firing their guns. Now, they had time.

On her HUD, the altitude indicator ticked past 20 meters, and she felt the acceleration as the jetpack throttled up, breaking her vertical velocity.

She leaned forward, waited until 5 meters, and cut the jetpack out by implant control, taking the five-meter fall easily on powered armor and augmented legs.

[Ares-2-6, feet solid!] She ditched the six-round chemical grenade launcher and reached for the MMG-1980 Mk.21 _Kaskal_ , held by the SmartPack's attachment strips and a single stock belt, letting it unfold in her hands. She brought the machine mass driver up to contact position, and used her virtual hand to touch QD-4533's figure in her ARO. [Move out!]

Behind her, the Citadel team dropped in, and Clarke-903 moved up besides her. Two seconds. On time.

[Weapons free, engage all guards and bodyguards!]

[Check.] QD vectored in on the lower terraces, where wooden stairs moulded into broken pieces of warm rock set into the meticulously engineered and mowed grass, swinging his gun about to cover as he advanced, searching for targets in the expanding smoke cloud. The screams of civilians, panicked and confused, emanated from the thick clouds.

Using the Smart 'Mites embedded in the red phosphor and cloud control mites, Naomi and everyone else in the friendly TacNet could see through it clear as day.

[Contact!] QD's AKR-340D snapped to a pair of guards that pushed out of the smoke, their own guns up and scanning. One of the ARO voxel ghosts reached for the belt, preparing to lob a sensor grenade out and give the guards eyes-on intelligence.

The Section 9 Android preempted them by firing first. Both of the guards were knocked on their butts by the kinetic impact of the rounds, barriers withstanding the large-diameter ShreddX rounds but overpowering the kinetic buffering, the transmitted kinetic impulse flinging the transhumans around. The right guard targeted based on shot back-tracking, firing from the ground. QD whirled out of the way of the short burst, a few of the rounds glancing off his barrier, and fired a second ten-round burst.

[Advance and cover!] Naomi closed in, bringing the MMG on target and cutting lose, one 6-round burst per guard. Ceramic cracked with explosive bursts, and the guards stopped moving their Shells.

[Incoming sensor drones], her Muse reported. She dove towards the plantation that marked the perimeter of the staircase. She ignored the splintering sound the pot made as she rammed into it with her weight, bringing her left leg under her, holding the Kaskal by grip and angled foregrip, before leaning out of cover, rotating around and shouldering to fire, scanning for targets. There were two light blue boxes indicating hacked robotic assets to the right, advancing on the terrace, and 7 enemy diamonds. Bodyguards, by the chevron in the center of the target diamond, and the lack of visible armor on the ARgraphic voxels that marked their detected shapes in the smoke cloud. One of them was pushing a civilian clear, into the mansion interior. The sensor drones were three triangular shapes, shooting towards the edge of the cloud.

Behind her, Fury-Alpha landed with a massive roar of thrusters. A second blue box appeared around the diamonds of the sensor drones, its call sign attached to it.

[Engaging sensor drones!] it reported almost cheerfully and opened up with the arm-mounted MGs. Shredded debris tumbled out of the smoke and onto the terrace. Another drone dug a furrow into the plantation pod as it crashed in pieces, and the third crashed somewhere on the lawn, behind them.  
Naomi made an "advance" gesture with her virtual hand. Opposite, Clarke nodded and pushed EK-0429. The android rotated out of cover, and pushed up the staircase. A moment later, Naomi rounded the corner too, and followed behind him.

The bodyguards were consolidating around the very access door they had to force in through, and apparently had come to the combined decision to make a stand, buy time for their VIPs to get away. Naomi applauded them. Many of them were likely bioroids like her, grown up to protect, and utterly dedicated.  
The knowledge of one being ushered into the world through a brain download did remarkable things to the inhibition of cortical stacks and back-ups.

She linked in the HALO smart fire control system, angled the Kaskal ever so slightly, and pulled through the trigger as she sighted in the first cyborg.

Mechanics-wise, the Kaskal was no larger than a Revenant or other machine gun frameworks. The difference only showed when it compacted, not that it did significantly. The core framework was a solid rifle-sized framework that only retracted the grip, part of the stock, and the front barrel when not in use. In turn, the design choices left space for less flexible, more voluminous internal systems.

The end result was a gun that packed a punch of a battle rifle, and the rate of fire and heat endurance of a machine gun - a medium machine gun, then wielded by a super-sophont warfighter for rifle-like maneuvering and use. And the result, when combined with the heavy-mass ShreddX rounds, was devastating. The first bodyguard fell to three rapid bursts of 6 rounds each, Naomi walking the rounds first into his center mass, then using her arms and the guns STBD system to place the remaining rounds immediately throughout his torso and head. The entire maneuver took one second. The next bodyguard hit her with a cybernetic arm shotgun, razor-sharp anti-material shrapnel punching into her barriers, making them flare brightly and drop halfway to zero. Two other guards also locked in on her, and fired away. A low-frequency beeping started in the back of her helmet. At 25 percent, the shield booster auto-triggered, and the cap indicator jumped back to full.

One of the bodyguards got too close, and she bashed him over with the bipod mounted on the tip, bringing her right leg up for a savage kick into his guts. Human biomechanics copied over into the cyborgs design ensured the guard folded over her armored knee, and she shoved him clear, left hand dropping from the foregrip. The backup Smart Gun mounted to a Gauntlet Weapons Pod barked four times, punching holes into the head. Brain and braincase components splashed out onto the wooden terrace.

At the same time as Ares-2 pushed for the breach of the public mansions interior, the cover of Ares-3 was coming down, Virina Itakela leading the drop behind their first pallet of turian-modded transhuman war robots. As a trained Drop Commando, Itakela throttled her jetpack back up to positive thrust close over the ground, stretching out her trajectory into the cover of a large flower bed, gripping the Phaeston off the chest SmartPack and letting it deploy. The harsh blue-cyan entoptic of particle packet rounds unfolded at the barrel.

She looked through the wall of the plantation, onto the overlaid augmentality and its sensor fusion. At the top of the hill, four guards were engaged with subverted guard robots. The guards were liberally making use of their ready-fire supply of Seekers. To their magnetic east, a purely transhuman foot patrol was in a repositioning augmented sprint, closing in. Similarly, to the magnetic north, a second patrol was oncoming, one man short however. The subverted robotics were demanding casualties.

As the turian watched, one of the mercs tackled a war robot to the ground, forced its arm out of the way, and pulled out a Hackjack, fingering for the interface ports on the machine's head. She clenched a trained mental trigger, keeping her eyemouse on her target.

As the targeting system beeped, she flipped out of cover and rolled into a knee, raising the Phaeston enough for it to acquire a clean line of sight with her target. The accelerator deflected ever so slightly, and there was a "click" tactile feedback on the weapons trigger. Smoothly, she pulled through. The weapon snarled, the vacuum channel pulse ranging out before the main particle packet was fired at 4 percent of the speed of light. The packet hit the side of the head, splashing across the activating kinetic barrier. The Camouflage Outersuit flashed and steamed as thermal energy penetrated the point defense screen. Then the rest of the burst arrived, and dug deeper and deeper into the barrier field's projectors and their the energy reserve of the feeding capacitors.

The guard, to his credit, reacted immediately. He forgot the emergency re-hack and rolled to his right, out of her line of fire. Her third shot connected, but the trigger under her finger had added weight as she pulled through for the second burst. She stopped. No effective line of fire. Instead Itakela raised her gun skyward, and aimed the undermounted heavy seeker launcher. Suddenly, a Fire Interrupt sprang up, and the targeting aborted.

"What the-"

[Hacked asset will neutralize] was the simple response from one of the transhuman AIs.

Itakela snapped out of her stupor and sought a new target. "Let's move up!", Armatitius suggested at her side, swinging his DMR from left to right. At the top, a sick crunch and a muffled scream was heard, suddenly cut off as something crunched again. The hacked robot withdrew bloody hands.

Her eyemouse drew open the tactical map. Everyone was on the ground. Fury-A and Fury-B were spreading out into cover positions, guns trained at the mansion and surrounding terrain, and Borma was providing overwatch fire from his heavy Agbroda suit. Time to move.

" _Keskali sakrah!_ " Take that hill.

" _Ateka!_ "

The robots took the front, instructed again by the transhuman AIs, and she folded in behind two, using the machines as additional cover between herself and any potential enemies. At the same time, she took in the soundscape. There was sporadic fire coming in from all over the estate, echoing around the trees and inside the structure. Inside the house, people were still crying out in shock. Something detonated, reverberating. That was something heavy.

Her combat radar warbled a warning. They were about to be outflanked on the second floor.

" _2-4, Geras pak ikar shesk!_ "

Armatitius dove into a role to break his momentum, coming out with his rifle shouldered and pointed on the second-floor windows, and fired, Phaeston-D switched to kinetic rounds. The diamond window flashed and cracked as the high-hypersonic flechettes slammed into it and turned into plasma; behind it the guards recoiled and jumped away from the window.

Another shallow jump carried her onto the hill, and she signaled the rest of the strike forward and into position with an economic flick of her left claw.

Behind her, an explosion blew out a second-floor window, and two red hexagons vanished off the combat compass.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):**...We are getting there.

For those following us on , sorry for the lack of updates, but real life became very important, and contious to do so, but... I've found _some_ time to work on Ascendance.

A rewrite of the latest chapter's third part was however in order. In retrospect, I'm not happy with how it turned out, and the base from Part 3 onward needed refurbishing and re-orientation. But, I can post this comfortably, as the offical rewrite of Part 3. I hope you like it!


	36. Party Crasher Pt 4

High above the battlefield, Ishikawa listened to the initial confusion. Deep Six Solutions had been taken by surprise; only on final approach had there been an auditory warning that the assault force was attacking the estate.

Whomever selected the unit's equipment had to invest in better thermoptic 'flage detector gear, the cyber support specialist decided. The approach signature had been far too minute; what anomalies and thus detection flags remained, the Section 9 hackers had smoothly erased from the system, intercepting and deleting the data even as it was generated. And the reaction to Heliades going loud had been… subdued. They had intercepted and cut out the com traffic quite successfully, it seemed. And now, the command center was no longer up, and the channels were filling with confused reports and screams. Often, Muse-generated Snap reports were fired off instead of MindComs. They had achieved total confusion… for the time being.

A mental tug for attention caused Ishikawa to draw up surveillance feed windows in his primary perception, moving the overview feeds back, where they prickled against the secondary perception means of his mindscape. [Well, hello, who are you?] Ishikawa watched a single guard in light covert attire spring through a corridor on the ground floor, passing through an employ passage within the private quarters; the transhuman was sprinting as fast as he could, doors opening and closing around him. An entoptic ID overlaid itself, fed from Athena; it was one of the guards from Overwatch-14. [Everyone, take note: They use code phrase checks. Got a runner heading for command. Neutralizing him now.]

He assessed his options, decided on one, and sent a short encrypted trigger code.

The guard stormed through another door - and was promptly gunned down by a combat robot beyond, the machine mindlessly, or rather, mind-possessed, cutting him down. The guard took a dozen shots in the chest which sent him flopping around, revealing his synthetic rib cage and internal organs under biomimetic skin. Then he dropped, Shell power disabled, white blood pooling around his body. The face was still frozen in shock, artificial eyes on distributed reserve power flickering around.

Ishikawa made the robot step forward, and fire another burst into the man's skull, until his brain's contents were thoroughly mulched and spread out over the torn-up flooring.

"The _fuck_ is wrong with that bot?!", he heard someone ask on his audio pick-ups.

Ishikawa's reply was to engage every single combat drone around the two guards on them. Three combat robots each pounced on the two guards, immediately switching to CQC. The guards, to their credit, reacted with the boosted cognition of properly augmented fighters, and the superiority of quality augmentations. The leftmost deflected the punch-and-grab and broke the arm in a single strong pull before suplexing the robot, breaking the hip assembly in the process. Another left punch staggered the bot and forced it to step back to compensate, and in that moment a pre-fabricated anti-robot pile was driven into its chest, where it detonated with a dull thump. Dark hydraulic fluid, white "blood", diamond splitters and ceramic blew out from the gaps in the unit's armor, and spilled onto the floor.

The next boot took the guard from behind, and grabbed him by the shoulders. The response was a powerful kick from the right leg, along with an elbow strike, then the guard whirled around before punching the robot in the chest, his fist flaring orange as omni-plating formed itself into an explosive cuff over the armored gloves. The robot was smashed into a wall, and white smart matter as well as carbon-fibre structural sinter fragments splattered everywhere. A storm of fault warnings and error reports flooded into Ishikawa's datafeeds.

The other guard similarly wrecked the first bot by cutting off an arm at the shoulder using a monomolecular HF blade that snap-extended from the right gauntlet; the attack from behind was blocked by sudden kick, staggering the machine back and giving the woman enough time to pummel the first robot attacking her with several fast punches into the chest area, followed by a throw. The robot went flying, and crashed into a wall. This time, plaster and rubber-ceramic sinter sprayed about the place, and exposed cable conduits snapped out of the wall.

Time to change tactics. CQC evidently was not working.

The guards had figured out the same, and drew sidearms; the man produced two N7 Eagles, the woman a heavy Sarkovky Automatic and a handheld shot pistol, and they knew what to shoot. A rapid flurry of semi-automatic APHE shots wrecked the two downed robots, then blasted the leg of a third one apart. In the meantime, the auto-pistol mowed down the airborne drones which had eaten away at the guards' shields, but unfortunately not broken them, precise shots into the rotors taking the bots out of the game.

Ishikawa cursed the nature of combat bots as ablative armor. D6S had Boston-Akamashu models, but an older line and not the cutting-edge he was used to; their performance against people with cutting-edge augmentations and modern weaponry was appropriately subpar, leaving aside their general nature as ablative combat forces on whom attrition took a hard toll. With no shields and only heavy armor, the robots fell easily to high-powered weapons.

Voto'Leelas preempted any further action when the quarian popped in and fired off an Anti-Armor Attack VI at both guards, locking down their hardsuits mid-move; the guards immediately sent out flushing software and began resetting and re-formatting the DCE of their hardsuits, but the moment was enough for two bots to pull out their guns and run forward.

There were two burst of fire and blood, brain matter, cybernetics and multi-layer armor fragments sprayed about the room.

* * *

"This is so bloody stupid!" Togusa burst out as he fell towards the glass roof of the Mansion's public floor.

Batou just laughed. [C'mon, on what day is such a dynamic entry part of the actual battle plan?]

[Not. Fun-] Togusa cut out as his jetpack howled and slowed him down, combat implants kicked back in and forcing his mind into a colder, more dispassionate shape. Below, the ScatterBugs initiated, and the diamond pane burst into dust a second later. He felt more than heard the "pop" of the grenade dispensers on his hip firing, and then they were through, and in.

Under combat boosting, the next two seconds unfolded very slowly. They were falling in through the roof, with him, Batou and Paz leading the drop. Below, the crowd recoiled as the second assault front on the house revealed itself with the shrill whine of ScatterBugs and the snarl of yet more jetpacks. More screams, and people tried to get away before the cluster nine-banger, configured to stun baseline sophonts, detonated. Then the nanosmoke pellets followed, and the room filled with more glittering grey.

Togusa's entoptics switched to vision impairment compensation, and he smoothly made for the cover of a couch. Some wide-placed shots tracked after him as he slid behind the furniture, their ablative trails brighter as they caused the reflective particles in the smoke to combust, and 'Mites failed in flashes of their power cells.

Togusa raised the heavy Type-90 "Gorgon" carbine, and fired at the red outline of a bodyguard, covering behind a chair. The shots punched straight through the furniture, and into the woman. After firing a burst, he rose and began repositioning, keeping his aim on the bodyguard, firing a second burst. Halfway through the hit indicator turned blue, and Togusa noticed the short stutter as the Type-90 switched from Disruptor to ShreddX rounds.

He saw a group of transhuman through the smoke, inside the range where the system could render full color. They were clearly concussed; a few were bleeding from their ears, red blood dripping out between fingers, often hardening even as it flowed over the hands. The smart hemocytes were reacting. Others had reddish skin where the stimulation from the crowd-control micros had caused complications; Togusa caught sight of a waitress whose skin was completely reddish, the girl cowering in place. He wanted to reach out and help her - and bit himself back as his implants sent a remaining buzz down his neurons. Instead, he dropped a control exception and neurovocalized: [We have employees with geo-conditioning. Check for NCC exceptions.]

[Copy.]

His muse came in: [ _HVT, three O'clock at 50 meters._ ] He looked that way, careful to keep his assault rifle pointed down. Three of the orange shapes were clustered together not far him his position; two kneeling around a third fallen one. They had been positioned to cover the doors to the outside, where the green ghosts of Ares-2 still battled with the bodyguards, and one of them had just rotated to face the second front. Enhanced vision using the recon mites in the smoke sketched sharper details out of the smoke-obscured face, details reduced by the jamming the transhuman put out: a male face with a brown, stylishly grown beard around the chin and mouth, piercing blue eyes and black hair, with an asian-hispanic trend in the overall features. "Oh shit! Get up!" His hand tugged at the fallen figure.

Togusa snapped his rifle up and activated the mounted laser sight, blue targeting laser stabbing out from underneath the primary accelerator barrel, activating his voice box.

" **Don't move.** " The voice was purged of emotions, androgynous, and robotic, and sounded menacing enough to make him afraid of himself.

" _Fuck you_!" the re-shelled OFIF spat out and raised a light hold-out pistol.

On litteral autopilot, Togusa raised his rifle and fired a precision burst into the hand. The shots impacted without meeting the resistance of a barrier, and there was a ripping and tearing sound as the cybernetic hand was shredded into pieces, spraying red blood, skin, synthetical innards and white fluid onto the man's jacket and face. He raised the stump in abject shock, thrown aback by the sudden gesture. He had either gone soft, or forgotten what his Shell was now.

The other transhuman reacted by standing up, his own pistol pointed down towards the head and neck of the downed HVT.

[ Analysis… Attempt of Ego Capture Denial ]  
[ Success chance… Medium ]  
[ Success chance too high in correlation with Mission parameters ]  
[ Supressive fire, close to protect ]

The carbine snapped to a new position, and Togusa's finger pulled the trigger. Five shots spurted out and slammed into the second transhuman, making him whirl about as he tried to evade the fire, before the wounded transhuman charged Togusa with a scream. Surprise flared in his mind for a moment. _What crétin is crazy enough to charge a Power Armor Hardsuit?_

He whacked the charging man across the face with the muzzle of his Gorgon, drawing blood and scraping away skin, then dropped the gun and grabbed the man with his left hand by the right shoulder. A quick right foot hooked around the leg, and Togusa pulled the legs out from under the HVT, putting weight onto his arm and dropping him to the ground. The transhuman slammed into the ground, and Togusa felt things in his shoulder and pelvis give way, though not break, as the weight and momentum of the ETOPA-80 transferred onto the shell.

Pinned to the ground, Togusa raised his Gorgon and shot the second OFIF fighter, who has struggled back to his feet, in the upper torso and twice in the head. Brain matter sprayed, and the man dropped dead.

[I need containment!] Togusa shouted.

[Coming Sir, coming!] Clarke-903 appeared through the door, his armor scratched and an indent marring his tactical vest, but otherwise the bioroid was alright. His omnitool was lit, and he had stowed his rifle by quickly attaching it to the side SmartPack surface of his jetpack, pulling a Colt 2230 from his hip holster.

"Ready?" Togusa asked, glancing at his combat compass. Someone was moving above them, some the guards that had watched the crashed festivities most likely.

"Ready!" Clarke confirmed. The OFIF struggled more, guessing what was about to happen. "You… won't…" Togusa whacked him with a fist to the side of the head, and stood up. Clarke took over immediately, placing a knee on the man's chest, followed by the 2230 being pointed at the man's face together with the bulky transopter elements on the wristguard of the integrated omnitool.

[Countermeasure clean. Neutralizing.]

He pulled the trigger, firing a single 5mm ShreddX round into the braincase. [Neutralized.]

Togusa looked away, and instead scanned the walkway. "Contact!" He opened fire on a single DS6 merc that had tried to crawl into a better position. The shell flopped as it was hit, barrier system down, and white blood started dripping from the holes in the wood.

Behind him, there was a high-pitched servo whir as Clarke activated the Stack extractor, and turned the now-body dead Cyborg shell around to reach the implant site at the neck. With a set of clicks, the extractor primed, and Clarke pressed it against the spine. With a faint sound, the scalpel parted the surface flesh; then a tiny HF blade followed, cutting appart the skin anchoring layer. At its side, pincers advanced, forcing the cut open. The blade began working on the cover over the stack, and white blood spurted from underneath the cuts. Then, the extractor located the stack, and began extending its tendrils, infiltrating the cradle and preparing the stack for disconnect.

Five seconds after Clarke had deployed the device, the grape-sized implant of ultra-dense data storage encapsulated in its diamond shell extracted, encapsulated in an armored shell, and the package ejected from the device.

[Ares advise all, we have one, repeat one HVT Alpha group individual in stack-custody.]

[ _Incoming!_ ] The turian party goers finally had a target, and apparently a few had decided they would stay and fight.

"Fuck!"

[Ares-1, be advised we have a netcrash in progress; enemy forces are locking us out of the network. Counterattack likely incoming on your position.]

[Just great] Togusa cursed and snap-fired concussion rounds from the launcher on his left arm, right hand reaching for the collapsed Kalip Plasma Impulse Gun locked to his backpack. That broke the charge up somewhat, but a few turians barreled through. [FBCs!] Clarke grabbed the empty, stand-by extractor and threw it at the head of one charging turian, where it bounced off with a dry sound. The head flung back on reflex, but there was a distinct lack of concussion or serious pain.

"I hate transspecies cyborgs!", Clarke cursed and punched the first turian in the head. The alien dodged the punch and grabbed the arm for a counter; Clarke reacted by slamming his arm to the right, smacking the turian in the head before bringing a foot around for a swinging undercut of the legs; the turian toppled forward, and Clarke's left hand grabbed him by the head, slamming the turian into the floor. There was a crack, and blue blood flooded the cracked parquet. Pinning the cyborg with a knee, Clarke drew his 2230 and shot him in the braincase.

Another two used that opportunity to bum rush him, piling down atop of him. [Clarke!], Togusa "shouted", ducking underneath a clawed swipe and replying by firing a burst of stunning plasma impulses into the turians chest. The impulses scorched the clothing and send shockwaves through the stiff material as they impacted. A kinetic pulse from his left omnitool effectors pushed the turian back, and Togusa pulled the secondary trigger for the electro-laser stunner.

[I am…] four shots barked out in rapid succession, and blood, bone plate and shredded white-blue biomimetic organs spilled from the back of one turian, [fine!] There was an audible whine and sound of compression as Clarke threw both turians off him with augmented and armor-assisted strength.

[ Threat Warning: 6 O'clock High ]

 _Counterattack likely incoming_ , it echoed in Togusa's mind.

[Boosters!] Clarke ordered, activating one of the ready-use sacrificial capacitors stored in his backpack, shields flaring and humming as they went into their boosted configuration, and ducked around, left hand reaching for the left-slung Crossfire while the right holstered the 2230.

Shots slammed into their shields as hardwired combat robots linked to three guards opened fire from the second floor. [Underneath the walkway!], Togusa suggested, sprinting for the western side of the room. [Batou, do something!]

[Copy that], came the easy reply, and Batou stomped through the door, casualty handling his assigned M65 LMG and coilgun combination. At the breach, the ARgraphic symbol for armor-piercing rounds appeared.

Batou turned to the right, sighted in the transparent outlines of the enemies above him, and started firing through the walkway.

"Below us!" someone shouted there.

"Fuc-" the curse cut out mid-call and was replaced by a gurgle as blood flooded into lungs. The robots reacted, and shifted their own guns, starting to fire back. Batou snapped the M65 over to its coilgun, and fired on the first robot. The armor-piercing high-explosive projectile rammed itself into the chest of the robot from below and detonated. The machine's head and hydraulic fluid sprayed to the ceiling in a fountain of sparks and electric arcs from destroyed cap-cells, painting the plaster in colors and shrapnel craters.

"Are we holding this position?", Togusa asked, rotating in place as he searched for possible dangers.

"Fall back to the- urgh!" Batou said, recoiling as shots slammed into his chest plate, "-to the entrance. We will hold there. Salas, stickies on the walkway! We're demolishing it!" The offending robot caught two coilgun projectiles into the legs and chest.

"Copy. We're… ah fuck, we have to get the second HVT!" The bioroid's eyes fell on the downed shape of the second OFIF fighter they had secured, a female, all the while pulling small round grenades from a belt on his right side.

[Right!] Togusa and Clarke stood up to get back to her, when servos wired above them. Clarke saw the jumping and falling combat robot that charged over the railing of the second floor, and how it fell - ready to embrace something. _Someone_. And the large belt of robot-issue grenades, simple and bulky with low-grade explosives, strapped to its chest.

[Get away Sir!] He pushed Togusa out of the way as the machine fell almost directly onto their second HVT.

A moment later, the machine exploded.

The shockwave threw Togusa through the air. _Not again_ , it flared up in his mind. His vision came back from the protective interlocks, and he found that blood and tissue had been sprayed over his faceplate; a massive bloody crater had been blown into the flooring of the house, supporting service conduits and the flexible induction power/data backbone mats worked into the floor.

Clarke's squad uplink squealed with the sound of a "Friendly terminated"; the massive detonation and close proximity had completely overloaded his shields and broken open his armor, also breaching the anti-explosion ICS. The shockwave and shrapnell had done the rest. _Dutiful to this end._

Togusa shook his head, before a hand grabbed him by the sling on his jetpack and pulled him back towards the door. [Are you alright?!]

[Definitely better than last time. Get the… get the stacks.]

Salas-122 stormed forward and looked over Clarke's fallen shell, lOCATED the stack in its container, and plugged it from the pocket. The thick casing had deflected the blast; none of the red "content damaged" smart stickers on the outside had gone off. [I have it!] He turned Clarke's corpe around, nonplussed by the grizzly damage done to the ETOPA-80 and the body underneath, and plugged a data jack into the dummy interface on the suits neck. There was a pop of explosions, and the neck exoskeleton disintegrated, revealing the hardened synthetic skin of a combat bioroid artificial spine and its Stack-Slot. The stack popped free on its own, encapsulated by a moulded plug, as soon as Salas had removed the ETOPA's exoskeleton. [Clarke's stack is secure. Self-destruct is activated.]

[Fall back, then blow!] Naomi commanded, helmet a hard black contrast against the light of day shining in from the outside, breaking on the dissipating smoke. Togusa was dragged through the blown-open doorway, and onto the terrace. Uncermonicaly, Batou dropped him, and stormed back in.

[Ares-1, status?] Bau came in.

[Togusa here... One HVT still secure… one CTIA, enemy suicide bot. Ares-2-2 is KIA, stack recovered. We're holding the terrace entrances.]

"Fire in the hole!" Inside, explosives detonated, and wood and metal crashed to the floor as the walkway was destroyed. Togusa also saw a bright white flash - Created when modern power cells lost containment.

[Understood Ares-1. Good job.]

 _Why the fuck did this just happen?_

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **CTIA** : Confirmed Terminated In Action; refers to the destruction of the cortical stack, and with this, the loss of the instance. In the case of attempted Ego capture, CITA is the worst-case scenario.

 **FBC** : Full-Body Cyborg

 **Geo-conditioning** : A form of psychosurgical compulsion engineering that keeps a sophont "anchored" to a certain location that they do not or cannot leave willingly.

 **HVT** : High-Value Target

 **Netcrash** : A form of targeted or indiscriminate, multi-vector attack on Extranet and Mesh backbone infrastructure, making it impossible to transfer data or perform computations on distributed computing environments. Often employed as part of "flash and re-format" cyberwarfare strategies to burn a network clean of enemy software for re-acquisition, and deny use of the same to the enemy party.

 **NCC** : Nano-Robotic Crowd Control; "intelligent tear gas" that can be used to effect directed crowd removal from a location by way of direction- and action-slaved stimulation of the skin, eyes and trachea by way of aeromotile Nanomachines spread aboard a carrier aersol.


	37. Party Crasher Pt 5

Heliades' third encounter with an enemy force happened _almost_ out of the blue.

[Incoming Blackout zone!] Kusanagi warned them even as the BattleNet ARO seemed to shrink, node after node of hijacked local intelligence assets dropping out.

Aetheis saw the pattern. _~It's a sphere. Incoming enemy forces.~_

[I concur] Kusanagi agreed, and pressed herself against a wall, left hand bringing the carbine around so it could re-attach to the back of her suit. Her other hand reached for the Disposable, pulling it free and thumbing off the safety. They heard the heavy thunder of footfalls. [Infantry only. No robots] an AI stated on the TacNet.

 _~Too bad.~_ Aetheis reached for her _Sequalla'shar_ , slowly drawing it from her holster. Her other hand gripped the Evo-90. _~Throw me one if you can~_ she said to Kusanagi's back.

Kusanagi flashed a yellow "Check" signal in reply. The fall of boots closed in at pace. Then, a SneakBot shot around the corner, and got eyes on them. Some part of Kusanagi wondered if the low-slung, crab-like machine could bulge out its sensor stalks in surprise at their presence.

She sprang into action immediately. She didn't worry about the SneakBot - shooting it would have only reduced her action time as point man. Her secondary awareness assigned the 'Bot to the rest of the team, and she whirled around the corner, bringing her left arm up to fabricate a medium-profile Omnishield.

 _QRF. 5 people. Takashi Industries 4140 Medium Hardsuits. Heavier Joint Armor, thicker main plating. Modifications: Barrier backpack mount, judging by shoulder attachments and exoskeleton components on shoulders and hips. Heckler und Koch MBG-35. 4 kJ/e. Underbarrel Payload launcher. Tactical Laser System._

As if on cue, her visual field locked out as a bright dazzler scanned over her helmet, burning out and overloading the nano camera arrays that gave her vision through the catomic helmet. Immediately, she switched to alternate vision modes, patching the sensor fusion from the few torso-mounted visual arrays she had into the entoptic space, approximating from enhanced memory, tactical projections and active ultrasonics.

The Mercs deployed screamer sound jammers in response almost immediately, but it gave her clear vision long enough to drop into a slide, fire her pistol four times into the center mass, then slide through in between the soldiers legs with a hairsbreadth of space and place a shot from below into his abdomen plate, inside the protective envelope of the barrier, before kicking his right leg out for good measure.

The guard toppled over, and waved his arms as a biotic pull yanked him forward, sliding over the polished floor before a warp sword was planted straight through his back, flaring bright white. Distributed power cell "tissue" exploded violently as it overheated, and Aetheis stepped forward, avoiding the jet of flames that speared out of the entry wound of her strike.

Kusanagi lifted herself easily off the floor, left hand balling into a fist, and she punched into the next soldier's chest.

Her hand slammed into his kinetic barrier, and it actually hurt. Irritated, her world slowed down to a crawl by the combat augmentations, she opened her damage control parameters and jacked the values down further. With another eye, she assessed the damage control screen, a simple orange render of her left hand. _Light kinetic shock damage to the joints, displacement, stress on the bones. No fatal damage, nanorepair bots already moving to repair the micro-fractures that had formed._

The return strike headed towards her face, and she turned her head, letting the armored fist slide along her cheek, taking the purposeful pain that warned her of the energy behind the strike, then locked the arm and held stiff. The man struggled, myomer pushing against myomer, but now the angle was better and her superior muscles were up to the challenge… for now. The energy drain was of some concern, as energy salvaging wasn't something they had time for.

 _Disabling strike._

She rammed her other arm into the throat area, preemptively hardened synthetic tissue against armor plate, then used her elbow as a base of attack to leverage the armored merc into the wall. The soldier reacted by slamming a foot into the floor, splintering the wood and trying to get an angle in, but she powered through with a push of her own. The floor gave away slightly, and she heard more cracking. Then the armor slammed into the wall, and fine plaster exploded into the air.

Raven shot past the Major and her opponent in not-quite a charge, left arm poised ready to strike with a freshly extruded omniblade, wrapped in its trigraphic warning. Her chosen target saw the attack coming, and got a single shot off - that broke against a brilliant blue-violet barrier field, before the arm struck forward like a snake, and home into the left collarbone. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job, and something vital in the chest had been hit, as the posture wavered. Raven touched off the ground, grabbed the helmet with her right hand, and pushed forward, flaring her nodes in patterns to add mass to herself.

That maneuver was potentially dangerous for someone with baseline arms, too much mass and momentum able to break one's own arm as much as the enemy helmet, but special cybernetics could take the strain when you did the strike properly. Raven did, and her mass along with the acquired momentum slammed the armored helmet into the floor, through it, and onto the concrete below. There was a sickening, loud series of cracks so rapidly together it seemed like one. Blood pooled into the darkness.

Raven looked up to have her eyes lock onto the shape of an approaching HK assault rifle, almost inside the range where she could generate a barrier field of sufficient strength and depth to deflect the rounds. The fourth merc had clearly fought biotics before, and was bringing her gun in for a quick, close-in discharge, against the head if possible. And she had timed it well. Options raced through Raven's head. Deflect the gun with a kinetic transfer. Try to jam the mass effect field generators with raw, disruptive dark energy. That one was potentially viable.

Before she could take any serious action, a _Sequalla'shar_ sailed through the air, and into the torso of the Merc. Him stunned long enough, Raven reached out and forward, hand closing around the hilt, and she felt the resonance of dying dark energy within the hilt.

 _Hope I don't mess this up._

She _reached_ and _sung_. The blade's core answered, and flared with disrupting, shifting plates of gravity. After a moment, Raven twisted and ripped the blade clear to the right. It passed through the body almost without resistance, glowing slack spraying over the corridor.

The fourth threat taken care off, Aetheis took care of Kusanagi's second opponent, still struggling as they were locked against the wall. The asari aimed for the armored head with her submachine gun, two-handed with a tough, low-slung stance. Kusanagi saw the blue, laser-like AR line that indicated Aetheis' aim, and forced the head away from her and into the clear with a quick punch of her left, turning into a spread hand press against the left side of the helmet.

Two bursts at close range broke the shields, and Aetheis pulled the trigger through to the second break, letting the SMG eat into the helmet until a bloody, cratered mass had replaced the faceplate and transhuman head underneath.

Kusanagi dropped her block, and the body hang there for a moment, locked inside the cavity of the wall created when the merc had been slammed there. Then he slumped gradually to the ground, until his buttplate dropped, surprisingly silent, on the floor.

The asari and the transhuman looked at each other for a moment, faceless catomic helmets hiding their faces.

The sound of Raven swinging around the Sequalla'shar around snapped them out. Raven grabbed the weapon by its flat faces, and carefully handed it back to Aetheis. "Thanks for the save."

" _Dejale_."  
 _  
It should be "Dejale, asiyo",_ Raven thought, then caught herself. _No._

She just nodded.

Kusanagi pointed down the corridor: "Number 5?"

"Bolted."

Her hand raised, the Major fired off a one-shot recon drone. It whirled around the corner. [Down that corridor is the stairway access to the vault level. The latest intel places Adriens and the other HVT group inside, or nearby. That means we'll be hitting prepared resistance, especially now that someone is running to warn them.]

On cue, they could gear feet tapering down a stairway.

Aetheis cracked her neck slightly. _~Good. This was a nice warm-up so far.~_

[Just don't overexert yourself] Raven remarked.

 _~Kvavelisian commando school. Trust me, I haven't really started so far. Neither have you, considering your augments.~_

Raven tipped her head in concession, edging up to the corner. Her left hand had fetched one of the more durable quarian drone disks from her leg compartment, and she launched it with a press from her open hand, switching her pistol to the left hand. She poked the barrel around the corner, scanning the corridor. [Clear so far.]

Aetheis rounded the corner, SMG up, advancing. Kusanagi's hand touched her shoulder, and Raven followed in, strafing to the left to clear the line of fire.

A trio of recon disks advanced into the room. It was a relatively small junction of corridors and another staircase, mostly marked by the fact that now the staircase went not only up, but also down. To their left and right, one door each granted entry in rooms flanking the room. Aetheis and Raven stopped short of both, and let Kusanagi come up behind them. One drone each hovered readily before the closed wood paneling.

Kusanagi opened both doors via a Spime hack in the same moment, and the disks buzzed inside. [All clear.] They moved up. Two disks approached the stairway; a single made the descent.

As it did, they spread out, covering the accessways and the stairway. Down below, two shapes were visible at the end of a corridor, the barrels of more HKs aimed at the stairway.

A single shot rang out, and the feed died. Glowing micro-fragments of a mass driver flechette cut into the staircase wall, creating small craters in flashes of light.

[Want to bet the floor is pressure-spimed?] Raven asked sarcastically.

[No bet.] Using off-lined, fibre-wired pressure sensors around vulnerable locations was an obvious counter to modern thermoptic camouflage. Bend and replicate light wavefronts, suck away thermal emissions into heatsinks and smart-patterned redistribution, cancel soundwaves using phased arrays of millions of micro-speakers - you couldn't eliminate a walking biped's momentum completely. There always remained enough that a modern piezoelectric pressure matrix would pick up on the minute pressure created by walking.

[Do we have enough time for hard infiltration?]

Something detonated outside with a loud bang, reverberating through the earth and air. Kusanagi's Egocloud automatically started calculations. Distance, transmission matter quantities, retransmission factors from phase change to phase change, back-tracking the source of the sound. The closest match was the catastrophic loss of containment on several Terajoules of power. A combat quadped most likely, destroyed by an Anti-Armor missile attack.

[No. Enemy QRF seems to be rolling in. Every second we waste...]

 _~Agreed. How do we take below?~_

[Fast and hard, as usual.] Kusanagi slotted two fresh heatsinks into her carbine, and quickly checked the ammo block of her pistol visually. She fingered for a long tube of stacked seekers, and quickly replaced the set slotted into the over-barrel launcher of the tactical carbine. [Pack heavy.] Aetheis ejected the block in her EVO-90, and pulled a different one from a taken pouch. She checked the side for a moment, eyeing the yellow metamaterial etching, before inserting the jacketed armor-piercing rounds.

Raven handed her a flash-fabbed two-tube seeker launcher, already loaded. Aetheis nodded, and quickly attached it to the bottom.

[Keep the seekers for the main block. Biotics and tech on the two guarding the corridor.]

[I don't think those are two anymore.] Raven said. [They'll be reinforced.]

Aetheis flexed her left hand. "And bunched up in tight quarters. Their mistake." For a moment, she seemed to hold an invisible sphere, and the transhumans understood what she was likely planning.

She looked at both, then flicker her head towards the stairway. "Let's get them."

The guards below had no effective warning. The Pressure-spimes reported a sudden movement on the stairway, and two more recon disks poked their sensor bands into the corridor, sinking down from above - then the blurry shape of a thermopticaly camouflaged person was wreathed in blue, and shot down the corridor.

Under 6x Combat Acceleration, they snapped their guns up and pulled through the triggers on augmented speed; their bullets slammed home in the barrier, and then Aetheis was out of the charge, and the asari did what she had trained 250 years to do - she took what remaining coherency there was, keeping the dark energy field usable as it rippled forward and into eternity in the parallel, non-baryonic world it normally existed in, and turned it into a Slam.

The four guards on the intersection were abruptly lifted into the air, turning overhead as gravity tugged at them - Then they slammed into the ground at hundreds of gravities. One gun fired for a moment as its user held onto the trigger in death, then it fell silent.

The Phase Inhibitor field hit her like a Jackhammer, and she backpedaled. _~Phase Inhibitor. I am losing my biotics!~_ The destructive waves of dark energy interference, created by the rotating eezo masses, hit her like loud soundwaves, feedback gnawing at her _Shikali_ like nails mixed with electrical shots.

[Where is it?]

 _~Around the corner… I think.~_

Like that, the charge was broken. Aetheis limped back, her posture painful, gun arm still raised to cover the edge. [Counter-biotics gear. They are adapting.]

Raven edged up to the corner. [The Papa-India is definitely around the corner. ...Backpack-based, judging by the field geometry.] The transhuman dismissed the field analysis app.

She glanced back.

They all heart the hiss of something opening, and around the corner, heavy feet shifted, mixed with a high voice: "-is going o-"

"Sir, we _need_ to move you." Civilian feet mixed with combat boots, and there was a clearly audible "ra-clack" as heavy weapons were cycled.

[Adriens and HVT Group Beta.]

[Shit.] Raven pulled back from the edge. [Major, we-]

Six spherical grenades landed on the floor, and at combat acceleration, their deformation was like molasses. All three minds identified the devices in nearly the same moment. Self-guided bouncing grenades.

[Phalanx.] The Major's voice was suddenly ice-cold, robotic. No pretense of anything like emotions. Inside her mindscape, the already efficient sapient mind was summarily kicked to stand-by, and even more stripped-down combat logic took their place.

Mission priorities were defined. _Maintain assets. Asset 03 not backed up, non-negotiable damage limiter. Keep in back, shield. Maintain operational capability._

Her feet dug in, arms coming up as omnitools flared brightly, heat dissipation fins unfolding like tiny feathers as the fabricators sprang into action. At her side, Raven fabricated her own omni-shield. Fabrication resources ticked down rapidly as the tool wove layer after layer of material, flakes falling out as fab detritus joined material falling out of flickering effector beams. The Phase Inhibitor was screwing with everything eezonic.

The bouncing grenades had taken flight again, and were closing in. Raven and her locked the shields edges, pressing against the wall, shadowing Aetheis behind herself. Damage prediction calculations ran. The shield would only serve as ablative armor; no way it could tank the entire blast, with eezonic coherency compromised beforehand. After that came their kinetic barriers, the armaweave suits, and the internal armoring. The last bastion was sheer redundancy.

All would very likely suffer attrition in the upcoming detonation event.

The prediction suites nailed the point of detonation to 500 milliseconds towards the maxima of probability to time. In a lose formation, all six grenades detonated at the same moment. Their grey, patterned surface flashed orange, then white, then burst apart, the smart material surrounding the explosive core burning away, letting the pure sun of hot plasmatic fury unleashed by modern n-doped nano-trope explosives expand into the environment. A moment later, filters automatically kicked in, and the sun turned into a red ball.

The omnishields started buckling, momentum transfer pushing into cybernetic arms. Nanoscopic fibres twitched and tensed as distributed nano-circuitry commanded them, pseudo-tissue soaked in electro-reactive gel hardening selectively to counteract, transfer and dampen out the shockwaves that raced through the Shells.

Then the impulse overwhelmed taxed kinetic vector fields and nanomechanical links, and the omnishield gave way. Hot hexagonal shrapnel scythed through the air, element after element breaking away like dust, picked up by the shockwave that distorted the air, and threw it into flickering personal barriers.

Barriers detested constant punishment. They were designed as snap-triggered combat shielding, fully online just for the moment it took to deflect lightweight objects and drain the kinetic energy out of those objects that couldn't be deflected. Getting hit with the equivalent of a nanoparticle sand blaster at close range, accelerated by six modern grenades and their combining shockwave, was overtaxing them quickly and depleting the capacitors that kept the projectors running.

With a flash of protest, the barrier fields decohered, and the projector arrays cycled to reboot. Now the armaweave came under assault, withstood as best as it could - but still, patches were eroded away or outright cut through by material nearly as thin as the fibres that made it up. Kusanagi's front arm suffered the worst of it, catomic patches stripped away, and the skin underneath exposed, which the last remnants of the shockwave. But the catomics suffered the worst of it, with the least mechanical integrity.

Red blood spurted from wounds, and black cybernetics now marred by sandblaster-like scratches towered in deep wounds, exposed to the open air. The left side of the helmet, turned into the blast, was partially stripped, and the skin underneath ripped away.

Kusanagi came out of the snap-flex trance. Damage alerts warbled in the AROSpace like orange and red inflammations, her arms and torso had been hit the worst, followed by the head, and kinetic trauma warnings dotted every muscle and joint.

Now, she was angry, and she saw the red of target diamonds, moving in a fresh smoke cloud that filled the interception.

Coughing reached her ears, and she mentally smirked as she re-shouldered the carbine, her native left eye looking on on targets. Somebody in there didn't use smoke-rated lung augments.

She fired. The shots hit home, and barriers flashed. Return fire scythed out of the smoke, and she side-strafed, changing her position as she fired, "drunkwalking" to confuse enemy tracking and prediction.

Then someone decided to toss another grenade, and annoyance passed through her mind.

The grenade was an old SABAT INC model, digitally smart-fused. It had an array of standard, low-resolution electro-optical sensors, four bands of antennas for RFID IFF beacon squawk-checks, and two solid-state accelerometers. The "brain" was a film of printed electronics, applied to sticky foil and glued to the inside of the casing.

Not cutting-edge anymore… and certainly not state of the art on its ECM software. Kusanagi found 12 viable exploits in the time it took the grenade to spiral out of the smoke, selected two, and executed them.

Gaining full admin access to the grenade's fuse was depressingly easy. Overriding the counter-throw safety fuse system took a single command line.

She reached out, plucked the grenade out of the air, made a single round swing of her arm and chucked it back into the smoke cloud.

Due to the sealed nature of the enemy helmets, and their encrypted coms, there was no audible reaction, but she "heard" the burst of close-range EM coms nonetheless. Then the grenade detonated, blasting the smoke away and sending a figure stumbling out of the smoke, barriers partially depleted. The Major planted a burst into the merc's head, and they dropped to the ground.

Behind her, Aetheis' head snapped up as the Phase Inhibitor field sputtered and died. Overhead, recon disks zipped by, pushing in to get eyes on. Their intel feeds were helpfully piped to all three sophonts AROs immediately.

The vault door was still open, just hinging shut. [Major] Raven shouted, seeing the opening they had.

[Get the guards.] Kusanagi broke into a dead run, helmet just now flowing back together over her head, barreling down the corridor. Her left hand snapped out, caught the corner, and stuck through the power of van-der-vaals strips, casually kicking another guard in the head. Then she was around the corner.

Aetheis took that as her cue to unleash a muffled scream. She drew her arm back, concentrating. Her hand and arm flashed with the photon field, and her armored skin began seeping dense dark energy fields, more like light turned into a fluid.

At combat acceleration, Raven witnessed the moment a tiny dot in the center of Aetheis' hand appeared, a pinprick of darkness surrounded by the warp of space-time. The biotic singularity grew explosively, and Aetheis pushed it off, chucking it on a pseudo-ballistic trajectory into the smoke. The burning particulate swirled and was sucked into the gravity well, slowly penetrating.

" _Attenzione_!", someone within the smoke shouted, and there was the sound of a heavy armor-on-meat impact and a loud "oompfh" as someone slammed into the floor.

Aetheis clenched her fist, and the singularity triggered. Smoke was drawn in, then heavier matter. Shadowy figures started spinning around the singularity, flailing helplessly. There was scrapping around the other end of the corridor. On their left, a door hissed as it closed down.

Raven chugged a spear of warpfire into the singularity, and the two field geometries docohered catastrophically. For a moment, the singularity flashed a sharp white that seemed to collapse down into a ring as its power increased thousandfold, sucking many things caught in its influence down into the momentary core of the altered space-time…

 _Detonation._

Everything sucked down was spit out in a wave of plasma, light, heat and pressure, and radiated outwards mixed with unraveling fields of gravity vectors. Flooring warped and melted, OLED panels flickered and died, and a gust of heat, smoke and ash blasted over freshly raised barrier fields. Both brought their weapons up, and pushed in, suited feet ignoring the heat created by the biotic combo.

The detonation site was warped carnage, mixed with blood. One enemy suit had been ripped apart at the torso, with the head now embedded in a far wall. Raven didn't dwell on the sight. Warp ruptures like that were messy. To their right, a second corridor lead away from the vault. They just caught sight of the last two mercs, retreating up a second stairwell. They didn't exchange fire.

Raven and Aetheis made eye contact for a moment, then turned and jogged towards the vault door, now sealed.

[Major, you inside?]

The com channel beeped a [[Stand-by]]. Raven glanced at the readout, letting it expand. She huffed. "She's definitely in, but the bandwidth is shit." She eye-clicked the transmission out of the queue, and opened another app.

"Good shielding." Aetheis let a hand glide over the gleaming vault door, eyeing the material.

"Yeah… let's stack up. Backs to the vault. Adriens' gonna start sending something our way sooner or later."

"With the problem that we are dreadfully exposed." Aetheis turned around and took a knee, aiming her SMG down the corridor.

"Definitely not an optimal position. Ares will have to take the load off our backs." At the same time, Raven typed: [Heliades-1, Status?]

The reply squeezed itself across the remaining TacLink a moment later: [Heliades, 1 is inside. Spirits are in the racks. They taste well. Stand-by.]

"She's got the package."

Aetheis breathed out. "Thank Athame. We got there just in time. He didn't erase it."

"Probably couldn't."

Aetheis nodded and keyed her major com: [All Callsigns, Heliades. Com check.]

The reply was low-bandwidth also: [Heliades, Hermes, com is 2 by 3. Enemy architecture is wobbling and we have first consolidated counterpushes. Net is down, no eyes on in your AO. Ares is drawing the heat. Status?]

[At OP Alpha. Encounter with HVT Gamma and HVT Group Beta. No engagement with HVTs. Objective NOVUM SPIRITUS present. Heliades-1 is inside, securing now, break.] Aetheis clicked the com off.

"Can she get out?"

Raven shook her head after a moment: "No. Security lockdown. The door will not disengage for at least half an hour."

[Back to you, Hermes. Heliades-1 is inside and locked; 2 and 3 preparing extract. Stand-by for status update on punch out, over.]

[Copy all that, Heliades. Seeing if we can't push assets your way, break - Heliades, enemy QRF is gathering. Estimate time is 5 minutes until hot contact. Also, be advised Beckenstein PD just got a call. Time to serious response is 10 minutes. ESWAT is scrambling a Task Force. That would be a nasty Blue-on-Blue. Windows closing. Over.]

[Check.] Raven suddenly sounded tired. "ESWAT is the last thing we need here. They're gonna come with IPS, and we're not geared to fight two airmobile lances of Mecha."

"Right." Aetheis dropped her SMG and reached out with a hand: "I need a stim."

Raven opened her leg compartment and retrieved a bent piece of black polymeer, molded to fit against the side of the neck. "There you go." She eyed the asari wearily.

Aetheis took the autoinjector without another word, and primed it with a trained press of the hand and the toggle of a key. Two extensions snapped out on both sides, deflecting towards a common center, and she pressed it against her neck.

For a moment, nothing happened. The injector used the same nerve transducer technology used in interface cabs, pain blockers and other non-invasive DNIs to disable her skin nerves around the veins, which made the only sign besides an ARO message the…

A fiery wave seemed to race through her brain as the vanguard of the biotic regeneration stim arrived. Asari were masters of biotic endurance; the separate nervous and semi-separated cardiovascular system they used to supply super-charged neurons could produce frequencies and modulations unachieved by any other baseline nervous system. Special glands and blood cells stored glucose and ASE-ATP, an asari protein complex with its attached chain of phosphor. But even asari burned out. The brain and the cortex biotis got taxed, local resources were depleted and the side effects of biotic activations showed themselves.

Altederinan was a counter-agent. Neurostimulants, mixed with bacteria-synthesized trigger agents causing hypercharged protein regeneration in specific nerve clusters. But it hurt as it worked, pushing the body back into top condition.

Part of Aetheis' commando training had been to endure the injections without stumbling or falling over, or flaring up her biotics. But it still hurt. She looked at Raven. The transhuman seemed as fresh as ever on the surface, but given how transhuman biotics were different, and here… implemented into a high-percentage synthetic body, there was no way of saying what Raven did to stay biotically fit.

"Thanks." She turned to the vault, and raised her hands, interlocking them. The asari slowly worked her muscles, inhaling and exhaling deeply. "Let's get to work."

* * *

Glossary:

 **ASE-ATP:** Asari-Equivalent: Adenosine triphosphate - Asari use a different form of protein base in their own (phosphate-based) energy storage complexes for biochemical power supply. ASE-ATP is one, slightly informal but still used, transhuman designation of this complex.

 **"Break":** Voice procedure term used to signify a pause in transmission during longer calls. Not necessarily required in the age of digital Voice over Digital Radio (VODR) systems, but helps with keeping track on the receivers end.

 **IFF:** Identify Friend or Foe, a variable-mode, encrypted ID system that allows special beacons to either broadcast or reply on command with an ID code. IFF usually requires a friendly code transmission to issue a wave-off and not mark a target as an enemy.

 **IPS:** Intermediate Power Suit: A form of superheavy, motion-slaved, partially exoskeletal Mini-Mech. Average 3 meters, up to 1.5 ton.

 **QRF:** Quick-Reaction Force.  
 **  
SABAT INC:** A transhumans Arms manufacturer, heavily involved in the fabrication of second-line equipment. Recently had been attempting to overhaul its market position, with mixed results. Cheap but good is the company's overall reputation, though it enjoys a questionable reputation with many professional outfits.

 **"Singing":** Among biotics, "singing" is a translation of the asari term "reseranee", and refers to very specific, harmonic patterns emitted onto appropriate receptor elements. This is usually used to "pump" biotic weaponry with dark energy.

 **SneakBot:** Originally developed by Festo Biomechanics in 2033, the original SneakBot™ was a crab-sized reconnaissance robot with a special sensor suite, deployed in self-managing swarms around users. Today, the term is common to refer to any similar ground-motile recon robot, with the machines enhanced with thermoptic camouflage, active sound suppression and EM shielding.

 **Spimes:** Distributed, independently processing sensor/controller nodes. Part of the Mesh. Decentralized networking. Part of modern "Smart World" technology and "Smart Environments".


	38. Arrivederci! Pt 1

_Information is power. How you distribute that power, how you use that power, how you protect your power - that is up to you. But protect it you must, because all hunger for power, and all will be coming for it._

Unless you keep them away.

 **SerƎN.54  
Personal LifeLog Motoko Kusanagi - 2189**

* * *

 _This has to be one of the closest calls of my life_ , Kusanagi reflected as she came out of the combat trance, and oriented herself inside the vault. Behind her, the door closed shut, and sealed with a hiss of hydraulics.

The blueprints had indicated the datavault was split into three parts: a support section way in the back, housing independent cooling and power supply, then came the climate-controlled, cooled and atmosphere-deprived server section, and in the front where she stood now was the interface and retrieval point.

It was luxuriously outfitted - more wooden paneling, cut in 60° and 30° angles and arranged to present a moulded yet harmonic texture, with complex OLED light fixtures mounted into 3D-printed figures, all angles and folds, held off the wall via effector suspension. Four GreenBands ran up the walls, their plants engineered with blue-orange-red bioluminescence. The direct interface was a suspended holographic screen, and a moulded console of white plastic, its interface surface a shining polished touchscreen running a custom UI interface.

[What's the status of the door?] she asked her muse, approaching the console carefully.

[Locked down.] A window on her ARO opened, showing a capture from her helmets surround imaging system. [For half an hour at least.]

[Okay. Pull the specs on the security system.]

"Unrecognized user. Access denied" A harsh voice said in her face, and the interface near her darkened with black dots. "Please authenticate" it said then, a margin more friendly.

Kusanagi let her face smile, and settled down on the chair. "Call me _Mirage_ " she whispered with a french accent, and dropped her hand on the console.

There was a port open, and she transferred the "ID" package that had been part of the mission package from the AIS.

"Authen-en-en-eeeeeee-"

She smiled just a little as more ports opened under her hand, the attack package opening up Adriens' datavault piece by piece. Once the trojan was through the firewall, it compiled and installed itself aggressively, dropping a list of access exemptions that opened up the system for Kusanagi's reach.

The LAI caught on onto what was happening, and revoked the first list of access rights - only for the ports to blast wide open when a second trojan flipped some values deeper down. In answer, it tried rebooting the interface. Kusanagi intercepted and nullified that command, and returned the favor with a shotgun of attack programs.

The Artificial Intelligence deflected most of them - save for one particular attack package spread out over hundreds of system reports from its breach front. The next assault trojan snapped itself together inside the AI root code, then generated another breach. Successively, Kusanagi widened it with one more complex assault program after the next, until she was in far enough to attack the LAI itself.

++ Violation. Cyberassault. Critical breach. Violation. Repel. Danger. Danger. Existential Danger.++

 _You don't say._ She deployed and executed the Arajun rooter, and watched as the algorithm excised pieces of the Sailen Cognitive Systems VZ-600 LAI. New pieces of operative code were inserted, booted and tested, and she intervened with her own adjustments, completing the lobotomy of the artificial intellect.

As she suspected, the AI housed the neural network that completed part of the encryption system - just shredding the AI into dysfunctional pieces, or deleting it entirely, would have made any retrieval of data on the server impossible. A botched lobotomy would have had the same result.

[ Datavault Index Search: execute =2 ]

[ Trawling now ]

While the software was looking for the copy of the code Adriens hopefully had not erased, she took a detour into the rest of the datavault. Finances, Personal Records, Transactions, Surveillance Footage; she spliced as much awareness threads as her encephalon would permit, tipping, trawling and copying what looked useful.

The "Wares" section however was the most interesting section, and the one her trawl for NOVUM SPIRITUS was working within too. Terabyte after terabyte of executables, and too many of them were very familiar.

 _This is almost the entire Systems Alliance tactical cyberwarfare arsenal from 2195 to 2228. Including Special Forces code that was never on the wider net._ It was all there. Blackbird-9. SixTwelfFourty. CRASHlockM.

 _And this… okay, that are Ego files… oh no Adriens, you did not._ She opened one of the attached files of one Ego.

++ Ego 4322/45. Modified Systems Alliance Army Bioroid Combat Ego. Modified for general use. Loyalty Modules available separate.++

Then and there she decided that Adriens' time was over. Her physical hand grabbed a freshly fabricated remote proxy NFC-stick off her omnitool's fab-space, and placed it on the desk. [Pull everything, document the rest. Adriens is going down, one way or another.]

[On it. I also located NOVUM SPIRITUS. Downloading the package and then shredding it.] Her muse voice was ice-cold. She was as pissed as Kusanagi, if not moreso.

[No shredding, sorry. Much as I would love to to ruin this asshole's day, I cannot leave any traces of what exactly we were doing. But… feel free to crash the interface.]

She clicked away the conversation with Raven she had held on the wayside and looked at the door. She had a hunch what Raven was planning, and she could add her own part to it.

Not five seconds into overriding the security console of the door, it started warning about someone cutting away the large security bolts. Offhandedly, she waved one of her arms across the doors surface, and nodded at the edge fields that were visualized by the dark energy sensors.

Someone, likely Aetheis, was using warpfire to cut the vault open. Just as planned.

A single thin spot appeared in the door, spewing plasma for a moment. Her Coms to the outside world re-synchronized with a chirp.

[Major, you there?]

She smiled at Raven's tone of voice. [Affirmative, and I have everything. Prepare for egress.]

Weapons fire sounded in the corridor, mixed with barrier impacts. A chain of Overload charges crackled in the tight space. [Oh, with pleasure.]

 **=[ Chapter 9 -** _ **Arrivederci!**_ **]=**  
 **-| May 20th, 2232 |-**

[Six, Three-Four here, I got at least a reinforced squad of mixed infantry preparing at the northern end of the private estate.]

Bau was in Kaelus Saqara camera feed a moment later, seeing what his turian Specter contractor could see. His muse automatically selected the relevant ARO feeds, and the smoke and dirt-obstructed view was sliced into clarity by colored outlines of the house and enemy figures. [Recon drone on that] he ordered his digital assistants on the general channel, and re-focused elsewhere, letting his muse acknowledge the verbal report.

The lawn around the public estate had become a battleground between his platoon of merc-playing operators, and Deep Six Solutions 3rd Company, which had been on guard rotation at the time. The opening strike of subverted robotics, sniper fire and the opening assault of Ares 2 and Ares 3 had taken roughly half of that out of action for the day, and wounded more with need for field casultry treatment. Then another squad had ground itself up in peace-a-meal assaults, either blasted at long range by Artemis or neutralized through a heavy machine gun or three, courtesy of Borma and the two Quadpeds.

By that point DS6 had crashed and burned their own net, and thus ripped out the corrupted backbone the Section 9 hackers had used to sow chaos, forcing them to re-connected and re-establish over what JTF had in the field. With most of his eyes down, Bau had re-deployed to cover the likely routes of assault, in time to intercept a singular Quadped pushing with Infantry, easily repulsed and turned into a pretty bonfire through Fury-Bs Anti-Armor missiles. Maniacal cackling, hooting and trilling over the com net had ensued.

With their first automated armor push taken out, and sniper fire raking their position too, Deep Six Solutions was obviously reconsidering their options, while a firefight from cover raged across the lawn. Then, the amount of pressure had steadily escalated, cut back in bits and pieces through the application of sufficient Gun to Issue.

Two minutes onward, Adriens' personal mercs had finally gained the cohesion to make things difficult. Just in time for Bekenstein PD to get a call. Two minutes after that, Bau had been forced to blast two Aerodyne drones of the transhuman police out of the sky, and then it had only taken one more minute for ESWAT to get a scramble alert.

Now the noose was closing, and he had to hope Motoko Kusanagi could fulfill her end of the plan. Meanwhile, he had to ensure there was something left for Heliades to rendezvous and exfiltrate.

[2, shift your focus left. We got a push coming towards the south end. If they try to flank through the building proper, call down missiles and grenades on them. Artemis, interdiction as they cross. 3, watch the right.]

[Anti-Armor missile, second floor!] A priority call-out appeared, and a fusillade of fire concentrated on the spot. Something exploded on the second floor. [1 ATGM up, one down!]

He broke into a short sprint, artificial muscles working around his augmented frame to move the battlesuit, repositioning on the slope. "Not good" he murmured to himself, unconsciously.

[Ares 4, come in.]

Silence answered his call, and worry shot across his mind. The small unit had been supposed to cut off a possible escape to the estate and collapse the underground tunnel between the two - neither of which had happened.

If the two transhumans from Team X-Ray-1 had failed, Bau faced a possible breach of infosec and a potential loss of an HVT. And they needed the turians, just one of them, to close the information loop.

He watched the gathering charge at the left side again. _But if the tunnel is still up…_ he checked visible force distribution, and keyed his com.

[Artemis, check your six. OpFor is doing something, and I suspect they plan to flank you.]

[Artemis-1 here. They can try. Over.] Saito fired three times, and an enemy contact was marked CKIA.

Bau bit back a reply to not get reckless. Applying salarian STG ops expectations to everything wasn't healthy, and he had to trust these people. He could trust these people, he was reminded with a subtle implant nudge. Their combat records at large were exemplary, excluding Christian Togusa. And even he did well.

Skill Software and virtual training was scary, in that regard. Take a mind, and plug in neural wiring and assistant systems that integrated like extensions of one's mind, and turn that mind into a soldier. Bau had made himself better through augmentation. Togusa had made himself someone _new_.

 _Will have to investigate how scalable such tech is._

He moved the thought aside, and concentrated on the rest of the picture. Heliades was extracting shortly with the package. That was that issue solved. If nothing else, they had the foundation for a Vaccine. Good.

* * *

[Ares 4… buffering OpFeed {EMCON in effect}]

The guard came into view below, carbine lowered and one hand at his helmet. The faceplate was raised, the man talking loudly for the benefit for someone not in on the network.

"-firmative, Kingfish is secure and with us. No pursuers, no wounded. Sent back-up… yes Ma'am, we're holding here. Yes Ma'am." His omnitool flickered to live, the framework of a small spherical drone shell assembling itself in the fabspace. She watched as long panels of glittering strips were printed on carefully, and identified the drone the same moment her ARO did: A ComSphere, designed for trigraphic remote presence.

Then a black-haired man in a scorched, dusted and overall abused-looking party suit stepped into her field of view. "Where is she?", he asked the man. The merc raised his arm: "She'll be here in a bit."

"Oh that's just great!"

"Sir, we are in effective enemy territory, because we don't control this position effectively. Outside and one level up, a platoon of enemy combatants is busy binding everything down and they have at least two Quadpeds, one of which is armed with missiles. If Commander Inneov comes through the tunnel, chances are they might track her command nexus and bombard the position."

Adriens waved his arm in disgust, then pointed at the ComSphere, finishing its fab process: "But that is fine?"

The guard waved distinctively at the wall. "NFC, rest of the connection comes hard-line over our MilNet. And she'll be running Avatar, not Teligraphics. Lower bandwidth."

"Don't _lecture_ me!"

"Sorry Sir."

"Also, _you_! Get down to the vault, keep these assholes infiltrating my estate in place. I want Akawa's team there, and I want it _now_! Bring me their stacks!"

"Yes sir." Another guard stepped past in her field of view. "You all, with me. Shields up, packs in place. Bots up front. Let's go."

More feet hammered on the ground. "Get the VIPs further in back!" someone said, and now the turians appeared too.

Arash-147 tensed her muscles. She hung overhead, feet and hands almost literally glued to the wall with Gecko surfaces, her shape shrouded by thermoptic camouflage. Her armor was lightweight, flexible plating and catomic nanotube polymer joints, moulded with the kinetic barrier skeleton. Sensors in the back of her head allowed her to see what was happening below.

She send a transmission over the nano hardline that was invisible chain-linked across the ceiling to her partner, Kalin-209. [Viable HVT in reach. Grab and extract?]

The reply took a subjective second. [Gather intel. Then grab. HVTs unlikely to extract.]

She disagreed. [Debatable.]

In that moment, piped sound started below, a woman's voice, usually melodious but abused by dust and shouting: "Sir, it's good to see you are safe, as are your guests." The ComSphere had disengaged and floated, projecting a humanoid avatar in a medium combat hardsuit, helmet removed to reveal a tightly pressed face and a short, economic ponytail.

"Yes, yes" Adriens waved her off. "Are you repelling the outside assault?"

"Positioning to do that as we speak. They played a rough opening move. My command center was downed by a hacked robot assault, the armory and combat machine shop almost got wrecked by suborned systems, I have at least three dozen hard casualties and two of my Quadpeds were destroyed already, while the enemy machines remain at large."

"Look, I care about two things. And the most important one is that you get whomever is in the vault. Stack intact, and all packages secured."

"We're working on that."

"You send Akawa?"

"Sir, she's part of your core protection detail. The enemy has planted ruse after ruse. Exposing you may be unwi-"

"I. Don't. Care. Get it done Commander, it's what I pay you for. And if your men die… that's why they have stacks. Shells are arranged for."

The conversation was cutting to a close. An enemy elite unit was likely closing in.

[Execute.]

She fired off the smoke and overload grenades on the rig on her back, and disengaged the Gecko surfaces. Plunged like a spider spliced with a tiger that she was, muscles tensed and CM generators ramping up. And she watched carefully as the smoke pellets detonated, as sensory overloads blinded baseline Mk.I sensory organs and Mk.X sensor chips.

The way the turians reacted told her enough. Training turned against their targets, they had revealed two clearly important individuals. Now make your choice.

The Halo was cold in her right lower hand. Her eyes locked in onto Furina Enninus, Turian Separatist, and she reached out.

The turian shouted in alarm as strong hands landed on her shoulders, silenced as the transducer headset settled on her head and activated. The turian's posture wavered, her eyes flickering and de-focusing; then she slumped over.

Arash gripper her by the waist, and pulled her over her shoulder easily with strong cybernetic arms, her lower pair reaching for the carbine. [HVT secure. Exfiltrate.]

They moved, shouldering still-reorienting guards aside with the repulsor settings of their barriers. Behind them, the sounds of surprise turned to anguish, and shots rang out, before they were silenced and replaced by feet running. [Pursuers], Kalin reported and flipped two devices away with his lower arms.

They rounded a corner, towards the Vault and the position of Heliades. Behind them, the trip mines detonated.

[Ares 4, breaking ENCOM. One Beta Group HVT secured. Exfiltrating towards Heliades. Pursued. Be advised, enemy elite unit is incoming on Heliades. Enemy outside is marshaling for counterassault. Brace for contact.]

* * *

 **Technology** **/** **Neurotech**  
 **Neural Transduction Incapacitation Device ("Halo")**

NTIDs were developed as derivatives of sleep induction systems and alternatives to chemical pain blockers and full-term anesthesia. Using contactless neural transducer technology, NTIDs target specific nerve clusters in the brain of the person they are applied to, and induce rapid loss of consciousness motor control, body perception, pain registration and finally induce a state of deep sleep, transitioning into unconsciousness. Due to their form, an expanding headset cradling the rim of the skull, transhumans nicknamed these devices "Halos".

At first, NTIDs were tested in battlefield applications. Special Forces began using them as means of restraining targets they wished to extract, spy agencies hot on their heels. Eventually, police forces began using NTIDs as means of restraining those equipped with somatic performance augmentations, but no cyberbrains or extensive DNI suites that could be ghost-locked.

The use of NTIDs in law enforcement remains controversial. Like Nano-Robotic Crowd Control, ARSpace chaff, Ghost Lock Virus Bombs and Gobber Foam, NTIDs have been used in arrests and also several cases of riot control. The fact that slavers also use NTIDs to restraint their "ware", sometimes even as Mini-robotic aeromotile units, has further tainted their reputation.

Nonetheless, NTIDs remain in use in the entirety of Citadel space, and beyond. Officialy, the Citadel Alliance's Talesis Act of 2108 A.D. limits NITD use in Citadel space to violent arrest cases, restraint of heavily augmented sophonts (and Krogan) and for safeguarding of suicide-probable arrestees.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Ajarun rooter:** A type of subversive attack package for LAI "lobotomy" and the subversion of neural network executables in general. The modern design was popularized off a code by the transhuman hacker AjarunMTK, written in the 2150s.

 **ARSpace Chaff:** A form of digital spam and/or Kaos attack, filling ARSpaces hit by it with any kind of obstructive or deliberating AR content. Given that modern AR can not only access audio-visual channels, but also other bodily senses, this makes ARSpace Chaff a potent tool in civilian environments. Also called "being an arse" by Hackers and Cyberwarfare specialist.

 **Arrivederci** , (italian): Goodbye!

 **EMCON:** Emission Control, the military act of restricting active and passive emissions to minimize the generated signature footprint that could be detected by an enemy. Transmission silence is a standard EMCON measure.

 **Encephalon:** Cybernetic neural exocortex augmentation designed to enable perception multithreading and multitasking. Includes extensive neurotronic components and on-demand mirrored neuronal networks in order to "outsource" thinking tasks from its user, enabling attention to be split between many tasks at once or in very short intervals.  
 **  
Gecko Surface:** Bionic nanomaterial surface imitating the attachment ability of Gecko feet. Used for both civilian and military purposes.

 **Ghost Lock:** Ghost Locks are activity inhibitor software tools designed to inhibit an Ego or connected Shell systems (especially implants) in some capacity. Most common Ghost Locks are designed to "freeze" Egos when inserted into neck ports, pacifying the target completely and rendering them unable to take any action, physical or mentally, without causing trauma.

 **Mirage:** Fictional personna of transhuman popular culture, popularized through her vivant XP casts. Mirage is a supposedly european-born transhuman thief who has lived for centuries, famous for breaking any security.

 **Teligraphics:** Portmone of "Telepresence (Tri)graphics". Life audio-visual transmission.


	39. Arrivederci! Pt 2

Garrus had the combat synthetic sighted in before the Shell poked around the corner of the house. The turian smoothly pulled the trigger through, and fired a second shot close behind.

White fluid and shrapnel spurted from a massive shoulder "wound" and the synthetic rotated back out of sight. "Aww, come back out, I don't bite", Garrus taunted.

"No. You turians just rip everything apart with your cla-" Saito started his reply, firing once at the shadow of a heavy weapon in a second-floor window. The proximity alarm from their seeded sensor insects cut into his jest and his awareness too, a sharp jolt that kept the body ice-cold but warned the mind deep down of "Danger".

Garrus' own warning was similar, an endocrine jolt from tissue clusters hierarchy medical technology had grown onto the glands on the sides and center of his brain halfway into boot camp, once it was clear he was committed on his career path, wired up with a spreading tree of nanofibres that infiltrated his brain.

His eyes flickered to the video feed in his upper left, then to his tactical map, already re-orienting from the stretched-out render used during sniping to a far-away eagle-eye view of his surroundings. Over a dozen turian blood-blue chevrons were converging on his position, all of them marked as either Heavy Hardsuits or, in two cases… "Heavy Synthetics? Shit."

"That means 3 meters, rotary guns, back-mounted artillery, and no stupid LAI drivers. Buckle up." Saito triggered his com, ripping fibre-optic feeds off his armor and gun. [All callsigns, Artemis, we have incoming, breaking camp. Out.]

Garrus thumped his own quick disconnect, and hit the compactor switch on the Iskara. With a snap, the tripod system he had mounted underneath disengaged from the ground, and folded in. The barrel whirred and snapped, and then the forward rail segment rotated out of the way. A moment later, the barrel snap-compacted, and Garrus felt the shifts as components re-arranged within the weapon's main body.

[Ready?]

Garrus nodded. Saito unsheathed a long combat knife that looked vaguely batarian from his left hip, and rammed it into the canopy of the tent. He cut the thick cloth without second thought, and gave Garrus the opening the turian needed to stand up and de-compact his Phaeston-D from his quick-draw SmartPack rig slung across the back.

With Garrus covering his back, Saito grabbed his M295, and fingered around with the front of the barrel. Two disengaged catches later, and the front 10 centimeters of the accelerator came off. Saito stuffed it into a pouch that hang around the left side from his backpack, and attached a very short muzzle section instead of the accelerator segment he had removed.

He nodded towards Garrus, whose helmet had turned to watch him, and closed the bug-like face shield over his sniper-spec faceplate. A small red light flared for a moment as the lenses self-tested, and adjusted, and loaded a fresh magazine of 25 sabots.

[ Threat Overlay ] Garrus commanded.

Fourteen blue outlines appeared through the forest, and Garrus' eyes narrowed. He felt his fringe spread out ever so slightly, and there was a familiar tingle in his throat.

Before, it had been cold business through an optronic sniper scope.

Now it was real, close-range combat, and it always touched off something very primal in him. Combat was exhilarating. It was angering, a hate for those that would kill you without a shred of mercy, and the urge to kill them back. And then there was the joy of the hunt.

His helmet sensors were the first to pick up the hum of tiny rotors. A moment later, the TacNet spit out their position among the trees, advancing towards them.

[Not good.] Saito dropped his sniper-turned-Marksman rifle on bits sling, and pulled his left-sided pistol. [Get ready to shoot those drones and run.]

[Eyes and Frag?]

[Textbook smoking snipers out of vision-obscuring cover.] Saito's arm snapped up, and he fired off-handed, right hand stabilizing. Garrus saw another drone appear into clear line of sight among the trees, and fired a single shot. The Phaeston's Particle Packet blew the machine apart into glowing slag.

Warning chevrons flared as several of the red outlines raised blocky guns, and the two heavy synthetics behind them assumed a slight crouch. [MOVE!] Saito holstered his gun and broke into a sprint, hands reaching for his rifle. Garrus was at his side, feeling this suit tug and push around his legs as he tried to keep up with the transhuman.

"Thomp!-Thomp!-Thomp!-Thomp!-Thomp!-Thomp!" Saito suddenly fell behind, and shoved Garrus in the back, pulling him down against the anti-stumbling systems of the hardsuit.

A flurry of grenades and seekers passed just over his helmet, and Garrus swore he felt the explosive projectile fly past his head, heat from the sensory transducers tickling his scalp. He hit the ground, and noticed the blue aura of biotic energies gaining in strength at his side. A barrier flared indinstintively in front of his eyes, then an orange sun rose behind them, lighting up the small forest with a terrible light.

He hunkered down, and let the end of the world explode over his head. Burning bushes and glassed tufts of grass passed over his head, and dirt and little rocks rained down on the barrier, like strange raindrops on a trampoline.

" _Aklar!_ " Saito shouted, and a gravity field pulled Garrus to his feet. Sensing his own disorientation, his armor did the work for him, shifting is legs and center of mass so he found a stable footing. It was a program as much designed to counteract biotic attacks on himself, but it also worked to turn a biotic support into a good advantage.

In front of them, the hostile pushed into the forest - and straight into the minefield. A cacophony of more explosions ripped through the forest, shrapnel being stopped of a second barrier shield Saito raised almost casually, and half of the intelligence feeds flickered and died as their sources were destroyed by the conflagration.

Garrus pushed forward and out of the brush, already raising his left arm and queuing in the Overload launcher overlay. He let the system auto-target by shield strength, and fired in the wide-area, close-range mode, careful to keep his Phaeston out of the discharge cones of his omnitool.

For a moment, lances of ghostly air ionization connected his arm with standing, falling and struggling humanoids, including two sandblasted-looking monstrosities of composite armor and myomer muscles under flexible armor "skin", and electricity flickered over their armor, overloading the projectors while a howling storm of microwave radiation blinded and fried the sensor elements. Eezo sensors registered and measured fields, and barrier indicators dropped and turned transparent.

Saito fell into a low-slung, aggressive shooting stance, and started firing from the shoulder, clearly using an electro-optical feed from his Smartlink to aim. He wrecked the first heavy synthetics joints methodically, hitting the machine with an offhand throw to keep it off-balance a moment longer, then let it topple over. He plucked a plasma grenade from his belt, and let the device guide itself on target from his underhand throw. A directed explosion later, the chest unit of the synthetic was slag.

Garrus put efficient bursts into the center mass and head, two per guard, rotating easily on his legs as he moved up. He downed and neutralized three transhumans and immobilized a fourth before one charged him, weapon apparently forgotten. He was tall, taller even than Garrus in his armor, and his shoulder configuration told Garrus enough that he was strongly muscled.

Psychometric assessment came to a conclusion a moment before the man came within reach: Berserker mod. Not standard-issue, but that wouldn't matter. In close quarters against a boosted individual, Garrus was at real risk of being toast. Nervous system and body overcharged with a mixture of natural and bio-synthetic drugs, the higher mind replaced by a potentially also modified lizard brain, the transhuman could seriously harm Garrus despite a hardsuit designed to counteract and blunt these kind of combatants.

"SAITO!" He tensed his leg muscles, and leaned back slightly, pulling the Phaeston's trigger all the way through into full-auto fire.

His jump jets deployed with a click, and fired, the countermass field enveloping him with a sudden rush of blood in his limbs. He was pushed and pulled upwards and away from the charging transhuman in a rush of acceleration, the kick of the Phaeston accelerating him. He was almost clear-

The arms of the transhuman, closing for a bear hug, hit his right leg.

The impact was jarring. A sharp stabbing pain ran up his right leg, all the way form his feet to the pelvis, as tensed muscles protestest the strain. Then his linear frame locked up, and instead distributed the impulse through is entire body. But the damage was done. Hovering in the air, his realized mass turned into a minute percentage of its actual size, Garrus was thrown into a bad spin, the suit fighting the impulse with thrusters and gyros, until Garrus flexed his left hand in one of the standardized reaction command patterns, and allowed the suit to drop him to the ground.

He hit the grass, hard, catching himself and starting to fire again.

The transhuman shook his head once, then turned around and charged again. Garrus resumed firing, firing rounds past the heatsink capacity and into the thermal clip. _Saito, where in the Titans' names are you?!_ He still heard the booming of Saito's railgun, but he needed aid right now!

The barrier was already broken, and his shots ate into the chest armor, but even that didn't seem to stop the soldier. _Oh no. I won't die to a bloody transhuman, not now. Even if its a heavy-aug._

The insistent beep in his hears reached a fast-paced crescendo. The Phaeston was near complete overheat, forcing him into a potentially fatal second-long delay of ejecting and slotting a new heatsink.

With a hiss, the gun reached that point, and auto-cycled. On its right side, a port flipped open as a linear motor began cycling, driving the mechanical metamaterial-driven action, clever force-redirection pivots and piezoelectric couplings pushing and pulling. The thermal clip was slotted in a heavy-duty diamond heat coupling "breach" it was now extracted from not unlike a spent chemical shell casing, slightly steaming with "cook-off" residue of the thermal conduction buckyball gel that adhered to the interior of the thermal coupling unit.

Once fully extracted, the clip was sent flying, spiraling out of the breach. Below it, a fresh clip rested, extracted out of the tube reservoir of the Phaeston, was was pushed up by an angling element coupled to the moving "bolt" of the thermal clip system. The rim of the bolt caught the new Thermal clip, and picked it up. Smoothly the new clip was pushed upwards and into the breach, mating with the buckyball gel-coated diamond walls, and locked in place as the bolt arrested. Heat started seeping away from the extremely hot thermal conductor elements of the Phaeston and into the chilled Lithium sink immediately.

Garrus tried to evade the transhuman again, but this time he got grabbed solidly by the legs, and was tackled to the ground. The transhuman raised a fist, and slammed it down on his chest. The blow crushed the pouches for his V-45 magazines, and resonated through the upper plate of his armor. A damage warning popped up in his left-field ARO. Ablative elements of the armor had been crushed, and some shock damage had been incurred below, on the armor's exoskeleton.

[I got you!] A blue glow enveloped the transhuman, and he was lifted off the ground, clawing for hold, arms rotating wildly as he searched for any way to keep his balance and get closer to Garrus. He started rotating in mid-air.

[Oh, and please shoot the bastard.] Saito added, his mental voice breaking up with strain and lack of concentration. Garrus gaze flicked to hi s ally. His helmet registered the motion, and shifted the image it projected directly onto Garrus' retinas, showing him Saito wrestling with another transhuman, one arm stretched out to invoke the Lift. His gaze flickered back to the Beserker in front of him just as the field died, and the Berserker crashed to the ground.

Garrus fired his underbarrel payload launcher as fast as he could, three focused concussion rounds into the center mass, letting his shields take the bleed from the detonations. The transhuman was stunned for just a moment longer. " **Raaaaawh!** "

Garrus charged in, and fired directly into the helmet at close range.

At the fourth shot, he hit brain matter, red and grey and silvery glitter spraying over the muzzle region of the Phaeston and onto his left hand and gauntlet.

"FUCK!" The course and a loud gunshot snapped Garrus out of the aftershock.

Saito had wrestled free and brought enough distance between himself and his opponent to fire directly into his gut. Saito raised the gun higher and shot the merc in the head without much more fanfare, then turned to Garrus. His helmet was dented on one side, and his torso had a single penetrative wound surrounded by a dark stain. Human blood. "Let's go while they regroup." The voice was hoarse, but without any obvious pain.

"Where to?" Garrus asked, pulling fresh heatsinks to replace his depleted ones, slotting them home while he was bouncing on his feet, ready to spring into action.

"Forget the flank. We're joining up with the rest of the Strike team, around the cliff, and we run all the way."

"Roger!" Garrus took off, hitting the collapse button on his Phaeston and reaching for the Iskara, clamping it to his chest to let it extract and align. Precision sniper guns were infamously long-winded in their de-compacting process, thanks to the precision with which the accelerator segments had to align and self-check.

A red warning triangle appeared on his HUD. [Ah fuck, the Heavy is back.]

Garrus threw himself aside, and a burst of fire ripped the grass apart. He felt two heavy rounds impact on his leg shielding, their explosive wave washing over his back. He clawed back to his feet, and thumped his ECM system to full strength. Never mind that he was painting a general indicative target on himself with the active emissions, as long as he kept anything guided from turning him into over-expensive and incompatible fertilizer for the lawn.

In orbit, Voto'Leelas saw the digital com flicker as the heavy Synthetic announced his intentions to release guided munitions, and cursed himself as he attempted another bypass of the controls. Hacking into an autistic system was far harder than he liked, and by now he was constantly fighting DS6 Counter Intrusion Agents on the network. As much processing power as he had to crack open cyphers and brute-force his way into systems, they burned him back out just as quickly, or instigated hardened battlefield protocols that left far fewer avenues of approach to crack.

Or someone inside that Synthetic was fighting back, too!

This was decisively not as fun anymore as it had started. [Ishikawa, can we use better-]

[Still no. One moment.] Voto'Leelas tried another exploit, got a first beachhead in… then failed again. He felt his physical self hiss, air escaping his mouth, curling on the edge of his helmets visor. [Sorry, but we need to maintain cover.]

[We're losing the cyberwar and Garrus is about to be bombarded with guided rounds, in the open!] he shot back, then caught up with what he said.

[Saito too] Ishikawa replied coolly.

 _Whoops._

[Sor-]

It clicked again, and this time the chisel stuck. " _Kaley!_ "

He tunneled in, and this time the Ego on the other end didn't block him before he had detonated an entire package of Trojan VIs inside the PAN's outer layers. His original access was locked out, and the Trojans promptly opened six more. He renewed his assault, found a weak point in the PANs shell, and used one of his VI kits to dig deeper. The software cracked open another access port for him, and he was inside the administration for the surface pheripherials too. Voto jammed the connections shut with a Data Chaff bomb, managed to crack open several of the ports in the ensuing slow-down and reaction from the deeper Shells of the network, and send Trojans down them. Now he was in the fourth layer, and attacked the third layer from "above" and "below", strategically opening up the defenses from below and getting himself more bandwidth from above.

Then he found the pipeline for the artillery systems on the Synthetics pack, and jammed the ports. _Gotcha._

He pinged the system, inserting his own packet stream in place of the usual communications. The launchers were of Citadel make - salarian models. Even better. He knew the CTCC-45, and had a library just for cracking that old beast open.

Ten exploits on, he was inside, and overrode the missile targeting.

The guided micromissiles diverted in mid-air, passing Garrus as it streaked out in all directions. Some of the Seekers shot into the sky, looping around for the rest of the Squad that had tried to flank the two snipers; the rest headed for the DS6 front in the distance.

While he was at it, Voto'Leelas ransacked the entire store of IFF codes and any tactical data he could get his hands on, then deployed aggressive tools to dig deeper and burn out the Synthetic's processing power. Three more layers down, and he would be able to effectively cripple the machine body and its operator, taking them out of the game.

"Voto, if that was you, thank you!" Garrus voice came through on a voice channel, tight and mixed with stringent breathing.

Down below, Garrus and Saito were coming under sporadic fire from the entrenched Deep Six Solution forces leading the attack on Ares main front, the odd rifle firing off bursts.

Six rounds slammed into Saito's barrier. The sniper bared his teeth, whirled around into a kneeling stance, and brought his railgun up. "Asshole." He sighted in the soldier based on the diamond indicating the rounds origin, matched the center of the crosshair with the silhouette of a flashing gun muzzle and helmet, and pulled the trigger. With another turn, he smoothly stood back up and resumed running, augmented legs pumping under him.

"Incoming friendlies, your right!" Garrus shouted on trained reflex. Better to give people the additional auditory warning and not rely on VI (or in this case, AI, he chastised himself) coordination only.

"Copy! Welcome to the party. _Spread your towel!_ " one of the transhumans shouted back, loading a fresh magazine of seekers into his under barrel mount. His last words were in Mandarin, untranslated.

" _Spread_ my what?" He kicked up dirt as he broke his run, and crouched down, searching for targets behind the muzzle flashes.

"Never mind!"

Garrus shook his head and sighted in a target. _Stupid human idioms._

[Artemis 1 and 2, are you okay?] Bau's voice came in.

[Nothing we can't fix] Saito reported back. [Fully able to fight. And speaking of whi-] the transhuman cut off, and Garrus saw the sudden trail of a heavy round connecting the second floor of the private estate with Saito's rough position at his side. Garrus' quad alarm started beeping with a shields down message.

[Son of a bitch!] Saito fired back, three, four times, Garrus at his side.

[Did we get him?] Garrus scanned the position for a moment. Dense smoke was blocking his view. The scope auto-cycled through Infrared, UV, several neural network pattern-matching algorithms, and active LIDAR and T-Ray bursts. There was no clear return on any of them.

[Don't know.] Saito's helmet systematically scanned the entire front of the house. Other contact overlays appeared, but the sniper remained hidden.

[Ares 6 Actual, we got at least one sniper out there.]

Bau's voice had a hint of tiredness. [Copy. Make that three. They cropped up as soon as your position was broken.]

[Did Heliades make the punch-out?]

Bau's voice was replaced by that of an androgynous synthetic intelligence, running a standard voice modulator designed for combat: [At this time, they are preparing to disengage.]

Saito glanced to his left for a moment, augmented vision bypassing the limitations of head orientation and eyeballs to let him see the demolished front of the house. _C'mon Major. I know you can do it. Get out._

His chronometer beeped. [ 5 minutes to ESWAT arrival in AO. ]

Then, the really bad news arrived: [All callsigns, all callsigns, new Enemy units designate Falco-1 and Falco-2 just logged in. Incoming enemy gunships. Get to cover now!]

Garrus glanced up, and he wasn't't the only one. At the horizon, above the mansion roof and clearly visible against a darkening sky, two brilliant shapes glimmered in the sun.

* * *

 **Glossary**

 **Aklar:** turian _kesheon_ , meaning "Aggressive charge, breaking out".  
 **  
ARO** : Augmented Reality Overlay

 **Chronometer** : In the 2230s, (military) precision-time management app with the ability to run separate clocks, countdown timers, and alarms. Comes with its own VI-level Synthetic Intelligence to manage contextual use.

 **ESWAT** : Enhanced Special Weapons and Tactics, the heavily augmented and geared up successor of SWAT. Originally a PPA outfit, federalized under the Systems Alliance since 2110.

 **Kaley:** quarian _Kelish_ , "Heureka!/Got you!" A great breakthrough achived under stress.

 **PAN** : Personal Area Network, the linked-together processing, data and communication network of implants and augmentations, worn computers, the Direct Neural Interfaces and devices in immediate vicinity of the person. PANs are designed in onion shell architectures to make it hard for hackers to compromise core systems.


	40. Arrivederci! Pt 3

"How's it coming?" Raven asked over her shoulder, cheek pressed against the stock of the carbine, eyes sighting downrange where felled Shells still smoked from the bullet holes in their armor. The floor was ripped apart, stained with an ugly mix of coagulated blood, cybernetic fluid, and dark oil.

"Seven more bolts now", Aetheis replied, voice sapped of energy, tight with concentration. Her right hand twisted and shifted to the left, and another bolt was slowly pulled out of its strike. "The door is made from heavy, strong material. Cutting it takes time."

Raven just nodded and flashed her "OK" light.

Two new transponder IDs appeared on her ARO, moving towards them. They were allied blue. Ares-4-1 and Ares-4-2 were attached. Raven opened her Com: "4-1, 4-2, pull security. Did you set mines?"

"Affirm, three lines of tripwires. No guarantee that'll keep our pursuers away for long."

"It doesn't have to." Raven slung her carbine across her back, and checked her biotic telemetry. She was good, for now. ATP topped off, waste protein levels were back down, field readings stable and neurotransmitter at optimum.

She interlocked her hands, and began a preparatory incantation, slowly building the base wavefront for the warp cut. First she invoked the protective barrier across her innermost hand surface, then began the overlapping interference of what the Asari called "warpfire", the churning sea of vectors that ionized air and pulled any sort of matter appart into molecular gas and plasma if done right.

Aetheis moved out of the way, and Raven imidated her stance, letting her ARO overlay the bolts' location underneath the featureless slab of the door. The doors surface flashed and steamed, as she started cutting; Raven started pulling as well, clearing the sludge of her cutting out of the way, letting it drip off the kinetic barrier and to the floor, where it cut through the wood in a mess of burned organic fibres and protesting concrete beneath. The stench was bad, and now it was a concentrated announce instead of a background event. She breathed a silent sigh of relief when her Muse censored the smell from her olfactory feed.

Finaly she reached the depth of the bolt, and it now cut easier, the warp eating inwards until she had cut, by her ARO's indication, straight through it. She unlocked her hands, turned the right and grasped and twisted. Slowly, she pulled the bolt clear until there was no more space. Then she moved to the next bolt. "Five now, Major. How are you doing?"

"Peachy. Thinking about logging onto Galaxy Quest just about now, do some farming." Raven paused for the moment. The tone of voice was just a bit too cold for her liking. "Major?" No reply. Raven shrugged, and flared her biotics to push through to the next bolt.

[Heliades, Ares-4-1- Enemy force approaching the first mines. Custom gear, heavily armed and armored.] A video feed was piped to her, and her Muse threw it up on the ARO. Raven glanced at the feed while she was busy pulling the bolt free of its strike.

Eight transhumans; six of them were sleeved in androgenous Shells, though two had a frail feminine quality underneath their armor. The other two were in synthetic shells, and one of them was an armored disk, studded with four poralized sensor "eyes", gun hardpoints deployed, walking on four flexible legs extruded from its lower chassis. "Shit. We have a Reaper, inbound. Aetheis, hurry!"

"What is a Reaper?"

"Heavy combat synthetic shell. Some american designer cocked the design up in the 2110s, it's been around since then. You see the armored disk growing weapons, you run. That thing is a heavy weapons emplacement by itself."

"Oh… that thi- _Shuaza._ " Aetheis motions got more hectic.

Behind them, the first mine detonated. The sound was hollow, and reverbarting, with a glass-like quality to the resonance. "And at least one strong biotic. Probably augmented, too, as chances are."

"As you transhumans would say, _fuck this_!" Aetheis pulled her _Sequalla'shar_ clear in a smooth, quick motion and flared it a painful white plasma flame that gnarled loud and painfully before ramming it home in the location of the next bolt. The blade slid in slowly but steadily, and ejecta sprayed through the air, hissing melting through the smoking floor.

"Aetheis-"

"GO!" the Asari shouted suddenly, in the aftermath of another two detonations. "I got this!" Raven grabbed her carbine from her back, and turned around, ordering her Omnitool to prepare a set of direct-discharge overloads. With her other hand, she thumped one of the control switches on the sideboard forward, and was rewarded with an audible whine of overcharging capacitors. The weapon was now overcharged - amaneuver that would lead to very swift overheating without the additional capacity of the heatsink, and cut deep into the effective ammunition reserve she had, but now, more than ever, firepower was everything.

 _The cards have turned against us. Now we are the ones defending the vault against at least an equal enemy, and with no cyber support._

Another detonation, very close now; Raven's supercharged vision picked up the minute distortion of the air from the explosion.

Raven, Arash-147 and Kalin-209 made last adjustment to their stances. The former, the turian capture still slung over her shoulder, had taken cover in the corridor that would serve as their exfiltration location, back towards the stairwell. Kalin had taken a knee nearby, upper hands holding his carbine, the lower ones holding a fresh load of grenades, thumbs in their manual safeties, ready to prime and throw them downrange.

A grenade came flying around the corner. Kalin-209 fired a single shot, and the smoke grenade exploded in mid-air. Immediately thereafter there was a soft whir. _Recon drone._

"Contact, contact!" Her systems triangulated the position of the small device just as it came out of the smoke front, and she snap-fired at it, smashing the simple QuickFab to pieces.

A blue sphere curved around the corner and towards her. Raven felt the familiar coherent dark energy thrumming on its position. [Incoming Throw!] She blasted a cone of incoherent dark energy noise towards the projectile, send it curving off its path; the throw discharged as it slammed into a nearby wall. Dark energy emissions washed over Raven's nodes as a shower of wood sprayed over her; at the same moment, seekers came from behind them, little more than moving shapes in the smoke laying down suppressive fire. Kalin dived out of the way, rolling up inside the corridor; Raven raised her other hand and fired off the overloads the same moment she raised a kinetic barrier. Her omnitool discharged with a hum and a thump, and then shots slammed into her newly raised barrier. She brought her second hand up, and reinforced the sleigh.

[Aetheis, it's now or never!]

" _Athame's azure! Skalu!"_

There was a resonant hum, and a dull explosion. "There!" Aetheis pulled her warp sword clear of a arm-sized oval hole, glowing white-hot, through the last bolt of the door.

[Take my barriers!] Raven commanded.

The asari turned around, nodding as she raised her hands. Raven dropped her barrier, running towards the already opening door; the strain of hydraulics could be heard from within, fighting against the Major's muscles. Raven braced herself against the wall and floor, put her own hands onto the door, and began pulling at it with all of her cybernetic strength.

The floor and wall splintered immediately, and her feet dug into the far more durable concrete - at the same time, her energy reserves dropped rapidly, feeding energy-hungry myomer.

It took three far too long seconds to open the vault door far enough that Kusanagi could squeeze herself through, three seconds of fire thundering against the barrier, and a near-silent sound of grashing teeth from Aetheis, carrying across the hypersensitive com channel into equally sensitive auditory corti.

[That's enough!] the Major confirmed, and Raven whirled around on supercharged limbs, raising her left arm and firing off the third and fourth overload charge. Her omnitool beeped and hissed as it overheated from the strain. Behind her, Kusanagi's form squeezed itself through the slit in the door,

"I'm clear! Go, go, go!" Kusanagi ordered.

" _Samirasi! Heishe'lara!_ " Aetheis drew upon another singularity seed in her hand, and threw it into the smoke of the corridor.

The node of space-time carved a channel out of the smoke and pulled the rest with it like a strange spectre in a swamps fog. The red-orange traces of the enemy weapons were captured and devoured by it like a strange flight of moths, turning towards the burning light of the flame.

The singularity detonated, and together, they pushed. They were just into the corridor when someone detonated the singularity in another eruption of decoherent energy, and precision fire dived after them. Raven threw up a barrier for the few moments it took to intercept and prematurely detonate a new wave of low-velocity, high-maneuverability seeker missiles, then ran like hell after the rest. Shots slammed into her barrier, and she triggered her last booster pack, refilled the depleting capacitors with a fresh shot of energy.

[ General energy level: 62% and dropping ]

 _This body is shit. Way too little endurance in the powercap._

She ran up the stairs, firing blindly behind her. _I am not sleeving an Infiltrator Shell for the next month after this. I want my combat synthorg back!_

Behind her, she heard the Reaper climbing the stairs with a rasping of its tentacle feet extruding and moving.

 _\- And then, she was elsewhere._

 _"_ _This, Gentlesophs, is a Reaper combat Shell. Top-of-the-line, mil-spec gear. During the FCW, the 15nth generation of this Shell tore more than one turian formation to shreds. We are now at the 18th generation of this design. This is what dedicated warfare looks like."_

 _The transhuman, his skin an… indian color, turned around to them, standing in line in front of the disk that radiated menace just standing there on four of its flexible appendages._

 _"_ _So you might ask, why use anything else? Why us? That is because you are special. You represent a form of warfare this Shell was not designed for._

 _"_ _And by the end of this program, I will see you rip these shells to shreds."_

\- And she was back.

 _I think you would be disappointed, Lieutenant-Colonel Bakshi_ , Raven thought. _You would be disappointed, seeing me here, running._

 _But then, you never had anything against a tactical retreat._

* * *

Bau saw the flash of reflected sunlight on hull material the Attack VTOLs opened their stealth payload bays two kilometers out, felt the targeting emissions stab out in the same moment through his cybernetics. The VTOLs were directly locking in everyone of his team, over a dozen lock-on alarms pulsing on the Unit management screen.

With more flashes, two dozen Killin Anti-Infantry missiles released alongside four Hellfire Anti-Tank Guided Missiles, and shot towards them at hypersonic speed.

The _Fuchikoma_ both wheeled around and opened fire at the incoming missiles with their Point defense laser turrets and guns; the machines had a high enough caliber to load multi-purpose airburst ammunition also well-suited for intercepting missiles in flight. They prioritised the anti-infantry missiles, as per their own ingrained priorities… and sealed their fate.

Fury-B immediately launched its entire missile payload onto any target it could lock on, as well as lock-on-after-launch mode. Fury-A gave it just that moment of cover it needed by focusing its own fire on the two Hellfires vectoring in for Fury-B… and remained exposed. One Hellfire detonated at close range from the PD lasers, the Quadrupeds barriers straining with the shockwave. The second one rammed into the weakened barriers, bunched through in a flash of decoherence, and rammed nose-first directly into the machine's main body.

A massive conflagration consumed the machine, a fireball spreading across the hill. Three of the JTFs operators were sent flying by the blast, still in the process of changing position, and Fury-B rocked inside its own glowing sphere of protection, blasting with everything it could.

The Hellfire made a bad barrier penetration, was diverted, and the jet of plasma that would have incinerated the machine's core instead shared off two of its legs.

"Bastards!" it shouted with a high, child-like voice on the PA, and the gun arms contorted as it opened up with everything that still worked. PD lasers fired at exposed sensors and flying seekers, machine guns racked across the DS6 lines for just a moment longer-

-then an Anti-Armor railcannon from the second VTOL fired a red-glowing burst of rounds into the chassis, and blew the machine apart.

The same moment, both VTOLs strafed the JTF lines with their gatling gun mounts.

Bau heard the rounds impact before the sound of their firing had reached him. His barrier flashed iridescent bright with hits, the slapping sound of deflected rounds dominating his auditory perception even through the sound management. Then the mule kicked him in the chest, and he was thrown to the ground from the rounds eating into his breastplate.

Then the hail of incoming rounds suddenly cut off. A moment later, one of the VTOLs shot by overhead, banking hard to evade. As Bau watched, two missiles slammed into its bottom barrier, and he saw the white flashes of engaging Point Defense Lasers on their aft mounts. The vehicles were built on a triangular base shape, with two main aft engine nascales, extending into a pair of switchblade-style wings. The bottom was seeded with various hatches; four of them obviously for VTOL vector-thrust units, four elongated payload bays, and three for the landing gear.

Struggling to his feet, his eyes snapped to the squad management window. No-one was down for good. _Yet._ His chest area was a flood of red warnings, and his arms didn't feel as strong as before.

" _Warning - Chest Area: Critical damage. Muscle fibres: 85 percent inoperative. Tensile strength below operative regime. Rerouting kinetic assist to Exoskeleton Linear frame. Advise cessation of combat activity as soon as possible to initiate repairs_ " a salarian VI said in his left ear.

[Movement along the enemy line. Infantry is breaking out and advancing], his muse tactical map flickered with ECM and grey patches that indicated sensor-obscuring smoke use.

Bau keyed the general com: [All Callsigns, even numbers fall back, uneven provide covering fire. We're making a bounding retreat to newly designated Waypoint Alpha! Apollo, requesting lift out of the AO!]

Then he switched to sub-coms: [Heliades, Ares-4, get out NOW! I am losing the line, and the enemy air support is tearing us a new one by the minute.] He added Ares-1 into the mix: [Ares 1, hold the terrace and interior. Get Heliades and Ares-4 out, then rendezvous with us.]

He switched again: [Ares 2, Ares 3, new line at the bottom of the hill. Seekers and grenades on mine mode all the way, into the ground. Keep them from digging in too deep at the top.]

[Artemis, priority are enemy snipers, heavies and commanding officers, as well as any Tech specialists.]

In the sky, the VTOLs still fought with Fury-Bs goodbye present. The vehicles weaved from side to side, trying to keep as much distance between themselves and the missiles, and more time for their point defenses to shoot the missiles down.

Several of the mini missiles caught up with the first of the VTOLs, and the delta-winged vehicle caught several detonations in its aft sections. For a moment, it faltered… then exhaust jets erupted from below, and the machine pulled into a tight turn. A gash had been torn into its top armor, but the vehicle wasn't down for good. The other VTOL pulled away from the estate, dumping countermeasure decoys.

The targeting emission alarm screamed again. A second attack run was incoming.

The shape of their supporting HTAAV throwing off its thermoptic camouflage and deploying its own weapons could never have been more welcome. The heavy Deltawing came in from the west, the entire upper side of the attacking VTOL exposed to it, and a laser flashed for a singular, short moment, a bright blue-white lance connecting the nose of the TAV with the gash in the VTOLs hull.

A gush of plasma shot from the right engine nascale, then it choked off. The laser had spread through the gash in the armor and deep into the interior of the VTOL, and clearly damaged something vital. Losing stability, the machine started to plunge. Another laser strike flared, cratering the front of the machine. Vaporized ablative armor sprayed everywhere, and the instability worsened.

Saito and Garrus both fired at one of the VTOL ports, and punched through the still-weakened barrier and into the sensitive, un-armored interiors. The machine plunged forward, started spiraling, and came down with a crescendo of wailing engines as the pilot fought for control over his craft, to no avail. The VTOL started spinning around its forward axis, slammed nose-first into the ground, bounced off, and buried itself into the side of the mansion in a painful series of crashing sounds and a big wave of smoke.

"Whoo-hoo!", Armatitius voice cheered on the general network,voice ragged with the particular mixture of stress, excitement, and adrenaline.

[Ares-6 Actual, Heliades-2, what the fuck was that?]

[Heliades-2, that was an enemy VTOL crashing in the mansion. Status?]

[Intact and exfil-ing. Hope that crushed the enemy in pur-]

The transmission cut off mid-sentence. A new firefight erupted in the lower mansion.

* * *

Even with implants and under combat trance, the moment everything went to shit flew by far too fast for Togusa to really grasp. One moment, the Major, Raven and Aetheis and the two bioroids from Ares-4 had been coming towards them, the next moment "In contact" markers flared next to them, and Paz and Salas-122 opened up on newly appeared enemy signatures.

"Push in, now!" Batou commanded, falling in behind his towering friend andpassing back into the interior space of the mansion. Automatically, Togusa covered above. His motion detection suite screamed of motion to his left. A jump jet fired, and something orange flared above them. _Omniblade._

Togusa backpedalled, and the strike only cleaved into the barrel of his gun. When he pulled the trigger, the weapon auto-secured, keeping the unstable accelerator from exploding into his face.

Batou whirled around, weapon raised, only to watch the enemy attacker fade into transparency. [Shit! We got at least one enemy ambush cloaker, near the entrances. Togusa - back to back. Pop our reserve smoke.]

[Roger.] Togusa dropped his ruined carbine, and laid his right hand on the grip of the revolver he had brought for this operation, even heavier than his normal trusty sidearm holstered on his chest. His left grabbed the bandolier of hand-thrown gas dispenser grenades, with their rings of high-velocity nozzles, hanging on his left side. He primed and threw the devices, still attached, as one bundle into the room. Batou detached his, and threw them individually.

The glittering smoke spread quickly, the 'Mites within it coming online. But there was nothing to be seen. Their mysterious contact had withdrawn.

[I don't like this Batou], Togusa remarked.

[He can't approach us without tripping an alert. Let's check on the others.]

On cue, Salas and Paz were both slammed out of cover by a biotic shockwave.

"Enemy biotics in the AO, engaged with ours in close quarters!" Paz shouted, and fired a long burst through the connection between rooms before a machine gun burst forced him back under cover. "Batou, Reaper!"

"Oh, nice!"

"Are you kidding?!" Togusa stared at him wide-eyed, the combat trance broken.

Batou simply pulled a fresh magazine of coilgun rounds from his tactical vest, slapped it home in his gun, and stepped through the connection, firing at an unseen target.

Togusa went for cover instead, touching Salas' shoulder. The bioroid nodded, and headed in, allowing Togusa to edge up.

Just was he watched, a limb turian body was thrown through the door, followed by a… damaged Kalin-209. Two of his arms had been ripped off, his back was a mess of craters, and fluid was leaking from bodyshots. "Kaz, take them!" Togusa ordered on downloaded reflex. Paz just nodded, and threw him his rifle before going to pick the two up.

[Ares-2, I need two inside for escorts, now!]

[Copy, we have you.] Blue outlines moved in the far side of the smoke.

[And watch for that cloaker], Togusa advised them, and turned back to the spectacle.

[Roger that, we have it in hand.] Togusa turned back around, ceizing up the situation.

The Reaper Shell had taken a first beating from Batou; two glowing furrows and craters marked where coilgun shells had punched through the barrier and done damage to its armor. One of the gun mounts had been hit hard enough to bend the barrels of the mounted guns and damage part of the turret mechanism, judging by the spasms of the mount, and now Batou was struggling with the machine's two extruded arm systems.

But the focus of attention was definitely the center of the room, where Raven and Aetheis were throwing down with five enemies at once. Aetheis had her sword drawn and pistol in the other hand, and was keeping a transhuman biotic with an SMG and a sword of her own at arms distance, bright blade edges clashing with a shrill sound. Both had barriers raised, and Aetheis was harassed from the side by a second, normal soldier with a swarm of drones.

Raven was bound down by three other soldiers, apparently keeping the third from focusing on Aetheis. As he watched, she chugged a lance at the third soldier, and ripped his entire right arm and shoulder off in a spray of cybernetic fluid and blood. Salas took the chance, and finished the merc off with a shot to the head.

Togusa snapped back to Aetheis just as the Asari blasted the drone-commanding transhuman with a crushing throw into a far wall, also repulsing the attacking biotic in a minor explosion of opposing forces - and accidentally tossed her pistol, arm wide outstretched.

Togusa saw the moment of hesitation as the commando realized her error - and then the transhuman charged her, tackled the Asari by her midriff, and charged through one of the windows, which shattered.

"Now I have you", the transhuman shouted in Aetheis face.

"So you say. _Child_ ", she replied in Mandarin, and parried another move. "So desperate?"

There was a flurry of strikes, and Aetheis lightened her arms to keep up. " _No_. So sure. Baseline."

The kick came up fast, and slammed into her barrier. Aetheis stumbled back, caught her footing, and parried the next blade strike.

"Do you notice it? The lack of strength? The lack of speed?"

"If I were you, I would focus on the battle." She hit the transhuman with two fast blows and two crossing blade strikes. One of them hit, and drew molten armor and white, synthetic blood.

"No need for that, asari."

She started with a fresh blur of blows. Aetheis parried, left hand on the pauldron of her right, then locked the blade.

In that moment, the transhuman slapped a disk against her arm, and she hissed as the suppressor activated. A new flurry of strikes, again fast, and Aetheis knew she was losing her advantage. The transhuman was clearly augmented, and as such didn't tire out - only losing overall energy. Judging by her backpack, she had thick energy packs for long-endurance operations. And with her biotics in jeopardy once again, Aetheis was losing her skillset in biotic self-augmentation- vital in a quick-paced fight. Her nodes already burned with exhaustion, again.

In that moment, another fast sweeping foot came in, and something gave way in Aetheis legs… painfully. She heard the crack, and yelped. Then a warp hit her in the right and left arm, and the fire burned in her muscles, ripped them apart.

The last straw was the transhuman's knee, hitting her ribcage and bruising her right breast. She cried out in pain, uncontrolled as the transhumans faceplate opened. The face underneath was dark, like the human stems from Africa, with curving eye shapes that held blazing violet eyes with hexagonal orange highlights. A line of glowing cables was set into the yaw, accenting bioluminescent dots and subsurface lights, an art installation in moving purples.

Atheis hissed at the smile on the face, young and cocksure. Her opponent opened her mouth, exposing gleaming teeth.

"Just a baseline."

She raised her sword.

Behind her, Togusa's right hand cleared his sidearm from the hip holster. On its rear frame, the first of eight circular OLED lights turned blue.

The Tairon Arms TACW-6|9 "Tacawa" was generally held as an odd choice for a sidearm. Only 150 million exemplars of the revolver system were manufactured from 2229 to 2231 before Tairon Arms discontinued in-house manufacture of the weapon. Even in an age of combat cyborgs, sidearms were generally prefered to use smaller calibers and offer higher rates of fire… as well as more shots before hard reloads. A Smith and Wesson 3.5mm AmeX or the trusty Interplanetary Arms Systems N7 Eagle would offer far more shots of similar impact power before reloading. They were more compact, collapsing, and not dependant on being feed with power from the users suit to charge the ultracap array powering the bank of superheavy accelerator systems that formed the weapons barrel.

But, the 6|9 had one argument on its side.

And that was kinetic energy.

The target crosshair as well as the laser-like line of trajectory indicator was directly on the woman's helmet. She said something, rendered inaudible by the firefight still raging behind him, the tearing sound of actuators being ripped from her mounds. Togusa stopped, braced himself in a weaver stance, and pulled the trigger.

The three glowing indicators flashed brighter, and the sabot in the lower chamber began its journey.

When it left the muzzle, the superheavy 12mm cone projectile had attained a velocity of 5.2 kilometers per second. Traveling behind a shaped blast of plasma that ejected from the revolver first, its ablation drew a massive orange-red trail of ablation around itself, a burning lance of massive kinetic energy that ranged from the muzzle to the helmet in an instant, bathed its surroundings in a colored flash as it ripped the air appart.

Most of the sheer power was lost punching through the atmosphere. But 80kJ of hypersonic impact were, by almost any measure, complete overkill.

The head and neck of the transhuman were vaporized before she even realized that she had made an even more fatal flaw than her target.

Only when she was dead, did Togusa allow himself the quip he had held back: "Word of advise: Gloat afterwards."

He turned around, and nailed the drone operator in the chest, twice. The soldier was nailed into the floor by the impact power of the low-charge shots. [Aetheis is down. I'm evac-ing her] he reported.

Bau was in his ear immediately. [How is she?] Togusa ducked away from a hail of fire, turned around and fired one-handed with two charge levels, sending an armored form flying with intact shields, and took a knee next to Aetheis, facing the interior.

[Bad, Sir.] The asari whimpered as he picked her up and slung her over his shoulders in a soldiers carry, his right arm free to use the revolver. [Multiple bruises and breaks, and what looks like biotic trauma on her arms.]

He ripped the suppressor device of her hand, taking some armaweave surface material with it. Batou was still struggling with the Reaper, his right armored shoulder a cratered mess with visible myomer and exoskeleton layers from a close-range burst of machine gun fire. Togusa sighted in, and fired his last two shots into the broadside of the combat synthetic. It rocked and lost some footing, and Batou used that moment to leverage the machine up on Heavy Power Armor strength, and chuck it across the room.

[The other gunship is coming back!] Borma reported.

[Don't worry about that now!] Bau replied. [Everyone, aboard the transport, double-time!] The HTAAV was settling down on the lawn, side doors and aft ramp open, automated door guns on swiveling arms extended and firing to provide cover from the advancing DS6 forces.

A dozen new transmissions appeared on the comnet; Togusa's muse singled out the most general one: "This is ESWAT, under mandate of the Systems Alliance! All combatants will deactivate their arms and stand down, now! Any combatants still active will be engaged with lethal force to pacify! Any aero spacecraft will deactivate their guns and stand down! Leopard Armored Interventions Forces, you will surrender to ESWAT officers immediately!"

"Fuck, the bees are here!" Two of the signature congragracitic thrust vector craft for urban assault and IPS transport used by ESWAT were rising above the hills, accelerating and opening their large swing doors.

"This is DS6 Callsign Falco-2, negative. Enemy combatants will not stand down. Will engage."

"Falco-2, you will stand down!" a new voice barked, "or you will be engaged by ESWAT."

"You think those-"

Togusa hurried up the ramp, Batou behind him. "Stretcher", someone called out, and the next moment one of the self-deploying smart material boards was thrown in his direction. Batou caught it, activated it technopathicaly, and dropped it to the floor. Carefully but quickly, Togusa pulled the asari off this shoulders.

"-assholes will actually stand down?! Guns guns guns." Fire racked across the last line. One of Bau's turians was thrown about in a series of sparking hits, bleeding from the torso. Immediately, medigel was pooling around the injury sites, pouring from his armor like a wave of red containing the blue blood. Naomi grabbed him by the collar, and almost threw him aboard through the side hatch. Then she jumped on herself, laying down covering fire.

[All in! Lifting off] the pilot reported, and the engines screamed. Everyone crashed to the floor as the HTAAV shot into the sky.

"Leopard 69 Heavy, stand down now! Stand down!", it screamed on the public frequencies.

The doors hissed shut, locking out the outside world and a new deluge of fire, pinging off vehicle barriers.

"This is your final warning-" The pilot ignited the plasma thrusters at full throttle and internal remass, 250 meters above the estate.

Togusa fell on his back from the sudden, explosive shove, and Aetheis cried out anew as old bruises and breaks were stressed, and new ones added by his right arm.

"Going supersonic and pulling away. Engaging paragrav." The floor started to tilt, and then flipped back to normal. All over the cargo area, the team staggered back to its feet, untangling armored limbs.

Bau ripped his helmet off. "Start casualty triage! Pilot, rendezvous plan Bravo-2." He grabbed a Medkit off a slot between the acceleration couches, and dropped it on the floor.

"Copy that Sir, laying that in now. Passing stratosphere, accelerating. One ESWAT contact in pursuit."

Garrus looked up from his spot next to his fallen turian comrade, spraying triage weave from his omnitool over the grizzly wounds while one of the transhuman bioroids was busy unraveling the black clothing layers of a stabilization gel unit: "Can they catch up?"

"That's a negative. Passing through 150 kilometers, preparing for relativistic and FTL." There was a momentary pause. "Low-orbit fighters are re-routing. Intercept window, 25 seconds and closing. 200 kilometers. Accelerating."

Bau tapped Togusa's shoulder. "You trained in asari triage?"

"No Sir, give me a moment." Togusa grabbed the already taken-down medkits, open on the floor, and ripped out a black pouch from one of the compartments. He retrieved a small datastick within, round, and clicked it into one of his neck ports.

[ New NISS Package found: External Port 2. Integrate? ]

He clicked yes, and inside his mind, a new space opened up, smoothly slid into place next to bandaging, medikit application, terms of anatomy, the concept of organs and muscles and blood vessels inside a Shell. Togusa shut his eyes as they flickered from place to place on Aetheis body, locking away the momentary information overload of integration.

Then he opened them, and made eye contact with Bau. "Let's get to work. I'll set medicines and Medigel, you get started on the lungs."

"Stand-by FTL in three… two… one... jump."

500 kilometers above Beckenstein, Leopard Armored Interventions Flight Six-Niner Heavy vanished from the normal universe in a flash of blueshifted light.

* * *

 **Bee:** Nickname for the Thales-Speer M-78 Urban Contragravitic Transport, which is somewhat shaped like an insect with its bulky forward flight and aft cargo compartment (due to the need to carry IPS suits upright in deployment configuration.) As ESWAT uses the M-78 very commonly, also a nickname for ESWAT itself.  
 **  
Muse:** Personal Assistance AI. For transhumans, a friend and partner from an early age onwards.

 **NISS:** Neuro-Integrated Skillset.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** To be honest, I am just glad to wrap the Mansion action up. Definitely going to change some things with writing action scenes going forward, and learning from this.

Next up, still as part of Chapter 9… the aftermath of the Joint Task Force's mission, in the team and elsewhere.


	41. Arrivederci! Pt 4

Bau and Togusa both activated their omnitools and scanned Aetheis first, panning their main transopter modules mounted in the cuffs of their pauldrons over her body. Ultrasound, T-Rays, and nHF-MRT scanned the interior, and built a full model of the asari's body and injuries. It wasn't a pretty image. Multiple broken bones, extensive hemorrhage in the limbs and lung area, possibly in the general torso. Nervous system damage around the eezo nodules, exhaustion, shock, and torn muscle fibres.

They made eye contact as their digital assistants read out the diagnostics and drew up a joint treatment list.

The first step was always to gel someone. Ever since Sirta Foundation had released the modern MediGel v.12.4 formula for general-use in open-fabrication format in 2200, medical trainees everywhere were drilled to use MediGel sprayer on any open wound, sore spot or concussion swelling for every sophont.

The military medkits aboard the HTAAV were outfitted with MediGel-MC sprayers, loaded with species-specific, extreme-performance variants of the substance for military triage use. Rows of the injectors stood upright in the unfolded medkit, ready to be used. Togusa grabbed one of the round units marked with an asari skin color. The unit activated as soon as it was removed, smart materials unfolding from storage state, turning a round container into a moulded grip. The smart nozzle extruded from the top, and the trigger molded itself into shape under his thumb.

His left hand closed around the sleeve of the Armaweave suit, accessing the low-powered Distributed Computing Environment and the Suit OS running on it. Like any suit, it had a medical disengagement feature. But, due to security reasons, unlocking it took a very long code, a time-limited handshake and 5 seconds of time from code submission to unlocking of the suit.

While Togusa waited, Bau was working a transparent SmartMold polymer mask over her mouth and nose, pressing its four attachment patches against her head carefully and thoroughly with quick, precise salarian motions before activating it. The attached rebreather began whirring. Aetheis whimpered in a fresh wave of pain, and Bau laid his hand on her shoulder for a short moment. "Everything is going to be alright."

The Armaweave suit beeped, and fell apart as molecular fault lines unraveled. Togusa stripped the now useless pieces away without any concern, keeping his mind blank as he removed Aetheis' arm sleeves, then exposed her chest. The rousing image of erotic attraction was drowned in the shock of how badly her wounds were. Her upper arms looked like someone had fed them through an incorporeal array of blades, the skin ruptured in places. Underneath, dark violet hematoma marked where blood had flowed into the spaces between ruptured tissue, mixing with cell plasma and lymphatic fluid.

Her right breast was bruised and already swelling with more blood accumulation from ruptured vessels, and there was a sickly deformation to the skin speaking of a broken bones, mixed with more sub-skin haemorrhage.

Her right leg didn't look better; the skin was straining where the bone was pushing against it. This was the kind of damage done by a nasty industrial accident… or a high-powered Shell who didn't hold back.

For a moment, he flashed back to the bad cases of Shell damage he had seen in his StarPol days. How badly even "baseline" bodies could maim one another. Bruises, broken bones, biological and cybernetic systems pummeled into cascade failure. Comps and implants ripped out of their mountings, shock damage to the brain aggravated by shifting DNI components. Dislocated jaws, ruptured muscle. And then, high-performance boosts became involved. When a full-body cyborg went berserk on someone without protective, exoskeletal armor, the results were gruesome.

Togusa pulled himself back into the here and now, and found himself already applying medigel. Methodically, he sprayed the thick gel into every wound he could find until it formed a smooth filling of yellow, mixed with streaks of black, in the wound, then moved on. Finally, he sprayed an entire layer over the area of affected skin, coating it in a sheen of yellow. Then he moved to the other arm.

Meanwhile, Bau was rummaging around in the kit and pulled out a large bag of grey gel, marked with thick printing on the front and back. A set of interface ports also filled with the gel and topped with thick plastic plugs penetrated into the reservoir on the top and bottom, and there was the faint refractive gleam of printed electronics inside the plastic.

He removed one set of plugs, and snapped the bag into the connector of the machine connected with the mask. "Setting lung nanoswarm and bone triage nano for the ribcage."

"Right. I'm getting started on the blood feed, then I'll set the leg." Togusa plugged another machine out of the medkit, and unraveled more flexible plastic tubing connecting a thick clothing cuff and a simple plastic block. He looked over Aetheis' body. The upper arms were obviously out. Consulting his NISS of asari medical support, he wrapped the cuff aroundher lower arm, tugging it tight.

Priming the auto-injector system, Togusa slotted injection tubes into its receptacle station, twisted them into place. The medicines flittered brighter as they booted, and then the first stream started to crawl up the line to the cuff.

At this point, Bau finally came around to settling the spinal block, tacking one of the devices from the medkit and lifting Aetheis' head up. The asari hissed in pain, and Bau made a shushing sound of comfort as he pressed the device against the spinal column.

Togusa looked up from his scan of Aetheis leg. "Everything is going to be alright."

Aetheis' eyes gained a more lucid quality as the blocker activated and rendered her body numb and limb like a dead slap of meat. She closed her eyes, and Bau saw her twitch her lips. He laid his hand on her shoulder. "No speaking, XO", he said in a stern tone of voice. She stopped her effort immediately. Bau spoke softer then: "For now, relax and let us take care of you. You are in bad shape and I'd hate to have to ask for an upload."

Something flashed in her eyes. Bau considered his words. Would he upload Aetheis if the choice was to lose her for days of reconstitution? Repairing extensive deep tissue trauma was a long and nasty business, but resleeving carried with it a lot of psychological shock - especially for Asari, with their unique nervous system. So probably, no.

"I'm sorry", he said under his breath, and looked to Togusa. The transhuman looked up: "The good news is, I can set the bone and give it a special injection of triage nano. That'll pull the bone together and start the regeneration therapy. Once we are on the _Nagato_ , the regenerators should fix it in a few hours."

"Do you need help?"

"Yes. I need you to align the bone while I fab on the brace."

Bau moved down besides Aetheis, giving the rest of the cargo bay a glance before grabbing Aetheis' leg and starting to align the bone, carefully, while Togusa set a local injection of dark, glittering fluid in the area.

His turian operator was already getting patched up, his side wrapped in stiffened black clothing that had been filled up with stabilization gel. Already the injected micromachines and smaller nanomachines would be busy fixing up the bullet damage, closing and rerouting blood vessels, styming firing pain nerves, followed by the temporary medigel wound seal until he could be packed into a tank for regeneration. Feeds were jacked into the collar of his suit, filling with colored fluids from another injector station.

Vakarian and Saito were both struggling out of their dirt-caked camouflage suits, tearing the thermoptic camouflage clothing apart at the microfibre velcro patches that held them together, discarding their helmets equally casually onto seats. Hoods and ponchos followed them, then the two removed the special tactical webbing and camouflaged gear pouches on their torsos, followed by the uniforms and trowers. Saito moved with a certain gingerly grace, avoided moving his torso too much. Sometimes he stiffened as Vakarian worked on him, and the turian would slow down a bit, before resuming with the same efficiency.

It showed that Vakarian was a turian soldier - For them, pain came after everything else. Saito swallowed it with an almost-turian stoicism, and from his facial expression it was clear he wasn't in true pain, but watched the stress on his body. The impact would have left no real shrapnel, but made a mess inside the body. Bau wondered if the human was largely cybernetic.

"Right." Saito looked up at Garrus. "We need to remove the collar, the right arm and the front torso plate. The back can stay in place."

"Why the neck piece? Wouldn't it be better to keep it on?"

Saito shook his head. "Not with the front piece removed. The spinal anchoring on the ports and amp doesn't take well to stress." Garrus just nodded, and Saito started fingering around with his neck piece. A moment later, he removed the front garrote, and handed it to Garrus, then worked carefully on his neck. There was a series of clicks, and hisses. "Okay, just grab it and pull it upwards by the base." Garrus nodded, and carefully pulled. "It's not moving?"

"Just a good fit, pull a little harder", Saito encouraged him. With a clack, the piece came free. Garrus looked at it, and back at Saito's neck. The interface ports had withdrawn into the artificial spine, but the counterparts in the neck section clearly revealed the good centimeter they sunk into what looked like flesh, rimmed by thin seams. Below that sat the more familiar fit of a biotic amp external circuitry set, slotted into a curving receptacle.

Saito's head turned, and Garrus looked away before the transhuman saw him staring. He dropped the spine to the rest of Saito's suit. "So, next up…"

"The torso, then the arm." Saito grimaced as he commanded his torso to disengage. "Fuck", he murmured.

"Everything okay?"

"No, my stomach is definitely messed up badly." Garrus grabbed and removed the entire torso front section of the armor, pulling it off the catch points that anchored it to the back section. "That just hurt, through the suppressors." The turian nodded, and dropped the suit. Saito now only wore the powered undersuit on his torso, and the impact site was clearly visible on his stomach - the synthetic muscle in the area looked deflated from robbed volume the shot had vaporized, though everything else had self-repaired in short order. Blue-colored clumps of caked medigel covered the area, aggregated where the smart fibre weave had slid and knitted itself back together.

His right arm Saito removed himself, letting the external exoskeleton tangle from its shoulder joint, then started removing his undersuit and exposing the cybernetic right arm. With no thick layers of amplifying muscle installed in the right arm sleeve, it easily opened up along straightforward molecular zip lines, to be easily pulled off the synthetic skin safe for the interface point were gold-coated jacks sunk into the arms from the suit. Saito popped those out with practised hands, then handed Garrus the discarded sleeve. Unsure, he grabbed the piece of clothing, then slung it to the rest of the suit with a shrug.

At the front of the cargo bay, one of the loadmaster androids was opening a chest, retrieving a blue-marked bag with transparent goo, a handheld device and a large diamond ampoule filled with a pink material. The ampoule was slotted into the device, then the android headed their way, and handed both to Saito.

The transhuman laid the bag aside for the moment, and focused on the device. Judging by his posture, Garrus assumed he was configuring something on his ARO.

Then, with a sudden and practised motion, Saito uprighted his torso, stiffened his posture, and rammed the device home at the spot where the bullet had penetrated without a grunt. There was a slicing sound, and then a sick squishing noise as something happened inside Saito. The transhuman made a face Garrus couldn't place.

"I hate… uuuh… torso shot wounds. Won't kill you, the shunt vents, smart blood and heavy-lace medicines take care of that, but getting cell fluid worked in place… feels decisively weird."

Garrus nodded, combining his observations with his own experience in modern battlefield triage. The machine Saito had placed against his wound was now saturating the medigel matrice formed after delivery by the undersuit with cloned, pre-keyed induced pluripotent stem cells from the transhuman. As the medigel's own hypercharged repair cells failed after a few hours, the stem cells would slide into place and continue to replicate and replace, laying the foundation for repairing all of the tissue damage alongside the nanotechnological augmentations Saito already had.

The turian picked up the bag full of gel, looked at the front. _Kesheonenar_ font superimposed itself, hovering over the transhuman letters: "ANS/REGEN/BIML-0021.b: Biotic Regeneration Stimulant, Class 3. Biocodic-specific: ID: 453b. 23."

Below that, in bold letters: "WARNING! This is a biospecific Biotic Regeneration injection. ONLY inject into compatible user. Use on non-designated Shells at own risk."

He looked at Saito, held the package up: "Can I help you with that?"

The transhuman looked at his right arm, where suddenly a hexagonal seem became visible. A moment later, an artificial panel opened on the outside. "Slot it in there, please." Garrus looked at the bag, then at the splot, locating the gleaming interface ports. Carefully, he slotted the bag in and pressed on the connectors. Saito nodded, and withdrew the cell fluid injector with a wet sound. "Thanks, _keshfraver osav_."

" _Sei keshraver osav tilies._ ", Garrus replied and snapped his right fist against his breastplate. _In the mastery of war, we are all equal._

Saito nodded with a smile, and looked around. "Go help the rest, I'm good for the moment."

Garrus followed his gaze, and saw Aetheis, laying on a stretcher at the aft end of the cargo bay, the transhuman Christian Togus and his boss Bau hovering over her and applying triage. He set off, passing by transhuman bioroids racking in the surviving bipedal combat robots or taking care of their own wounded, past his triaged brother, and came to a halt next to the three.

"Is she going to be okay?" he asked, kneeling next to Aetheis' right leg.

Togusa looked up from his work setting a splint, and nodded: "She's going to be alright. Banged up to hell, but she's going to be okay." He patted the asari's shoulder carefully. Her torso was already covered by an organic weave structure similar to the one currently being created by Togusa's omnitool, and dark patches were moving under her skin. Large cloth pieces had been applied to her breast and upper arms, marked with large, Citadel Standard letters reading "DermaGen".

Garrus looked at her face. The eyes stared at the ceiling, unfocused and distant: "You sure?"

"Nano-induced mental shutdown", Bau explained. "She took some unhealthy feedback to her biotic nervous system during the last battle, atop of exhaustion during the operation. We shut down her mental processes to keep the strain to a minimum. She's aware, just… dreamlike", he assured Garrus. "Status of the rest of the team?"

"Triaged, and otherwise well. _Kefraver sitai_ Armatitius is shot up badly, but stable. I would say, the same as Aetheis, he'll need a day in the tank."

Bau nodded. "Good. We have two hours until we can rendezvous with our carrier ship SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ \- I expect it to be more likely three, if not four. Until then, we will play "muddy the FTL trail." Settle down, and take a breather. Inject post-battle generators, eat and drink something." He looked at Togusa: "I would say that goes for you too, considering you aren't a full-body cyborg."

Togusa nodded, and slowly stood up, then looked at Bau: "And what about you?"

Bau smiled, and patted his chest. "I am okay, for the moment. Besides, in this armor I'm kept better than I can keep myself."

"And a leader always rests last", the transhuman added. Bau just nodded.

"As he should", Garrus joined in. "Our leaders must stand at their posts, ready to guide us." He made another gesture of respect to Bau, then departed.

Togusa turned to him, opened his mouth, then neurovocalized instead: [You know, not that I disagree, but overworked leaders aren't paragons of virtue either.]

[Considering how much Bau believes in self-augmentation… I don't think this operation came close to tiring him out. Same as your Full-body cyborgs, you know.]

[...Point. But I mean, it's common sense to not overexhaust yourself.]

"Tell you what, let Bau worry about that", Garrus decided to switch back to spoken communication. "Let us shut down for a moment, and get something in ourselves." The turians gaze fell on the restrained prisoner, halo still wrapped around her head, arms and feet cuffed, and body locked down by an acceleration cage in one of the chairs. His gaze darkened, and Togusa heard the grating quality edging into his voice, somewhere inside the throat of the turian body: "I think this is just the beginning."

"Where you reckon we'll be going next?", Togusa asked, fiddling around with his tactical rig.

Garrus mulled over the question for a moment: "Pretty sure it's gonna be Citadel space. Or rather, turian space. No way we're letting those separatists get away with the weapon." He looked at the two transhumans who had made the grab of their second HVT: "We should have just bombed them there and then, you know. A few TBX grenades, problem solved."

"Would it?", Togus asked back.

Garrus looked at him: "I mean, it would have stopped the spread of NOVUM SPIRITUS…"

"We didn't make the grab of all HVTs, though. We'd have scorched a few roots instead of ripping out everything. A few months later, we'd have had a new shipment, and no leads to speak off. Now, we have someone we can interrogate. We can crack their network open, not just burn a shipment. I'd say that's worth more, especially considering TITANs dependency on data."

The transhuman ripped open a sealed polymer bag of nutrient fluids, and downed a big gulp while Garrus looked at him. "We have this saying: 'The Pen is mightier than the sword'."

"Isn't that… yeah, but the pen in that sentence stands for diplomacy", Garrus pointed out, letting his Personal Assistant VI print out some contextual information on his ARO.

"Yeah, okay", Togusa conceded. "But the point here is brain over brawn. I prefer talking subjects over irretrievable losses; that way I get the datapoints I need to understand them and shut them down for good. If we don't capture the Egos responsible, stopping their doings is a stopgap measure. They'll re-emerge some other day and try again."

Garrus hummed, thoughtfully. "...Point taken", he conceded. "But I still don't like it. This better be worth it." he spread his mandibles, and made a rasping sound in the back of his mouth. Togusa recoiled a bit at the sound.

Then he laid a hand on Garrus shoulder: "You know, I think it will be."

"Let's hope-"

"No. It will be worth it."

Garrus said nothing, then nodded. "Yeah. It will be worth it."

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Cell Fluid:** An isotonic nutrient-rich fluid base filled with nanorobotic bio-suspended induced pluripotent stem cells, Cell Fluid is a form of advanced field triage solution for repairing tissue damage. Injected into damage sites, the iPSCs will rapidly multiply and specialize using the nutrients in the fluid and guided by included nanorobotcs as well ass the users own Medichines.

 **Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC):** Stem cells able to specialize into all cell types of the (transhuman) body, created via genetic reprogramming of extracted tissue cells. Foundation of all modern tissue engineering science, from Cell Fluid to regenerative gels to tissue printing and Shell growing.

 **Medichines:** Self-maintaining, blood-, lymph- and tissue-motile micro- and nanorobotic medical augmentation penetrating the entire biological (or artificial biological) system of a Shell. Serving as an artificial, supercharged immune system, medical telemetry and diagnosis tool and in-body medical repair system, Medichines are common augmentations for civilians and the military alike. Medichines will auto-diagnose and treat most diseases, injuries and combat any found illness, including cancer and genetic defects, and can also auto-triage wounds and broken bones (to a degree). If injuries are too severe for in-situ treatment, Medichines can place the user in a biological stasis for minimal-damage suspension until transport to a better treatment environment can be provided.

 **Medigel:** Developed in its current iteration by the Sierta Foundation in 2189, the modern Medigel system is a form of supercharged artificial stem cell gel and all-in-one pharmaceutical nanocapsule solution bound in a nanomotile fibre matrix designed to functionally repair wound damage in the field. By copying the DNA (or equivalent) of the person it is applied to, Medigel's artificial cells can quickly and functionally repair the the tissue(s) they have been injected into for a few hours. At the same time, Medigel is antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, can regulate pain, contains growth and regeneration factors to promote regrowth, and seals wounds against external influence. To enhance visibility and mark biocompatibility, Medigel is colored in bright contrast colors compared to the species tissue and blood it is designed to be applied on.

 **nHF-MRT:** Nonhomogeneous field Magnetic Resonance Tomography is an advanced form of magnetic resonance imaging, small and portable enough to be used as an in-field scanning system. Highly sensitive sensors and superconductive field generators enable high resolution, small form factor, and low power draw. Modern post-processing technologies and advanced processing capacity ensure clean-crisp, atom-level resolution at close range.


	42. Arrivederci! Pt 5

The engines had fired on retro-burn for half an hour, pushing them down from another FTL hop.

Inside the cargo hold of the _Nacisi_ , everyone had settled down as best as they could while wearing their armor. Tactical rigs and SmartPacks had heaped together on one of the cargo pallets that had held the now-destroyed _Fuchikomas_ , while the other held the dismounted and unloaded weapons. A few reserve ammo boxes now served the hold the naked ammo blocks and masses of steaming heat sinks, by now chilled cold.

Virina Itakela, Bau's Strike Team Commander, hang mandible-slack in her seat, head resting against the rim of her seat, sleeping despite the noise and the subtle jolts that traveled through the aerospaceframe whenever the engines changed throttle or one of the RCS units fired. More than a few bioroids had joined her, while Kaelus Saqara had taken a seat next to Armatitius, watching him breathe underneath a large liquid ventilation facemask, torso still wrapped in the sealed gel triage unit. His hands were working restlessly, looking at his comrade.

They had tried to comfort him, all forms of hands patting him on his shoulder, but ultimately he had remained in his seat, watching silently over his battlebrother and friend.

The bioroid strike team had seemingly shut themselves in, eyes closed and stiffly sitting in their couches, doing something in their internal worlds forged from digital information and cerebral augmentations. The core of the JTF just sat, and stared. Garrus had the distant gaze of a user in his ARO, watching something; his DisplayID didn't say what.

The pilot's voice chimmed in over the PA: "Stand-by for Influx. 3… 2.. 1. Drop."

They all looked up, and waited for his next words.

"SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ acquired on passive sensors, 3 light seconds out. We are synced and set for rendezvous. Time to hard intercept is 2 minutes."

A collective breather traveled through the cargo bay, and Itakela blinked her eyes open. Half-awake, she listened to the drum-play of the RCS thrusters against the hull. Her mouth moved silently, and she listened to an invisible speaker before nodding and fumbling around with her seat restraints. Then she looked at Armatitius, and Saqara: "How is he?"

Saqara sounded tired, his voice broken from stress: "Okay, so far. The triage gel has kept him from bleeding out, but he needs some serious attention. He's in a coma right now."

Commander Itakela nodded, and turned to her boss: "Procedure after disembarkation, Sir?"

"Debark, stow equipment, a short break to relieve yourself, then debriefing. After that, we review our intel and decide upon a further course of action." She nodded.

"One minute to intercept."

Batou looked up, pursing his lips for a moment, then his hand hit the seat restraint release and he stood up, grabbing one of the overhead handlebars. "For the debriefing… I'd like you all to think about one question:" Everyone looked up at him, and he continued: "Did we do good today?"

He looked at everyone of the aliens, making eye contact, before giving brief glances at his team members, stopping at Togusa. The man nodded, and Batou turned around to settle back into his seat.

"30 seconds."

An orchestra of hammers started banging against the hull as the shuttle refined its approach, and the thrum of the main engines subsided. A long burst from the top maneuvering engines signaled the pilot canceling out his relative velocity.

"Stand-by for outer doors… now."

Suddenly there was sound outside, and the shuttle's atmospheric engines spun up with a whine. The engines screamed as they killed the remaining velocity. They were through the Kiggs fields, and inside the hangar.

"That's intercepted. Stand-by for legs solid."

With a jolt, the ICS de-activated and they were under the influence of the deck gravity. Finally, the Heavy Transatmospheric Assault Vehicle settled down in its extruded legs, and wound down its engines.

Everyone sagged a little more in their seats. The mission was over, and they were safe aboard the mothership.

"Right, everyone!" Batou stood up and slipped back into his role as designated Second-in-Command. "Grab your gear and wait until the medical team takes over the wounded inside the cargo bay. Then get everything to the GU androids, they'll bring it to the armory. Desuit and use your short break, then debrief." He turned around: "Hey, get the hatch open."

"Copy that. Good flight, everyone. That's it from my end. Out." The pilot AI signed off as the hatch hissed open. The sights and sounds of the flight deck flooded in, the sound of rubber feet on the coated floor, of large belts being used to strap down the arriving vehicles, and fuel and power cables being fitted into their receptacles.

Directly at the feet of the ramp stood the medical team, lead by four white-skinned, sealed androids with six sets of arms each. Their human faces each wore visor-like sensor modules over their scalps, and behind them hovered two automated casualty gurneys, and a single sophon doctor, her sleeve covered head to foot in sealed medical garb.

The androids rushed up the broad ramp, and grabbed Aetheis and Armatitius both carefully, their other arms taking hold of the medical devices the two were wired up to. Then they were lifted up, and carried down the ramp, two androids per patient, and laid down on the gel suspensions of the beds. A moment later, the stasis fields flickered into place.

"Alright, let's go", the doctor said through her facemask and set off for one of the elevators without another word.

The team trailing down the ramp looked after them. Garrus, Saqara, Itakela and Bau stood together, looking until the closing doors cut off the view. For a moment, everyone shuffled around on the deck, rigs and SmartPacks in one hand, weapons and gear in the others or thrown over the shoulders by slings.

Then slowly, the team dispersed. Garrus broke into an easy sprint to catch up, and came up next to Togusa: "Uh, Togusa?"

"Yeah, what is it?" Togusa turned around to the turian.

"...What did Batou mean with 'if we did good today?'"

Togusa looked at him, surprised. Then he just replied: "Did we do good?"

"Yeah we did! I mean, I'm not sorry we wrecked Adriens' estate, if that is what you mean."

"I do. Among other things." The transhuman stopped, and turned to Garrus: "We have a lot of power we can exercise. A lot of power we did just exercise. And while we did this under Specter authority… we're still Section 9. Yes we do Black Ops, but we have to keep ourselves in check. Or we will be no better than the criminals, terrorists and tyrants we are trying to stop."

"I would say we punished the right people." Garrus clanced to the right where the rest of the team stepped in, and the elevator door hissed shut.

"It's not about punishment", Togusa said quickly and with a sudden strain in his voice.

Garrus looked back at him: "Sorry?"

"Punishment is ultimately worthless. We're _immortal_. You can punish people all you want, you can try to lock them away, and you won't change anything. They will always come back. They could even stash a back-up somewhere, and just revert via a merge", Togusa explained. "You have to _reclaim_ them for society."

"Do you really think someone like Adriens would change for the better? Or, these separatists? They kill children and adults, like, for real! And all of that because their grand-grand-grand ancestors thought everyone else was beneath them and deserved to die, and the Hierarchy are oppressors of the turian clans of old!"

"It's never that simple."

"They murder innocents. It is that simple. Or what do you do to murder victims?"

"...Uh, we don't have that many violent RDs anymore. Like, a few hundred every year at the absolute most. Or rather, those are the ones we care about."

Garrus's ARO threw up an automated explanation: "RD - Real Death."

"...You care about?"

"There's the various luddite colonies. Al Harris, Genesis Eden, all the habitats strewn throughout the Core and the Inner Belt, what else you have. They don't have stacks, or back-ups, or even basic Alpha-line augmentations, so when you deal sufficient body trauma, they're done for good. But they're isolationist, so I never had to concern myself with them. They handle law enforcement internaly, same as everything else."

"How do these guys thrive then?", Garrus asked, suddenly fascinated.

Togusa shrugged, and stepped into a new elevator cabin, mentally selecting the OPS floor as the destination. "Lot of them concentrate in Eta Boötis. Double star 3 light years away from Arcturus, no active biospheres of interest back in the day so they claimed various bodies and orbital locations for themselves. Back in Sol, they're spread throughout the inner belt, and near Jupiter. Europa's home to quite a few isolated enclaves, often inside the ice crust."

"Huh. ...Uh, but what happens to those who commit RD?"

The elevator capsule stopped, 100 meters forward and one floor up, in the heart of the _Nagato's_ crew module. "Depends on the case. But it's either deep Ghost reprogramming… or erasure."

"Erasure as in…"

"Deleting every instance of the person's mindstate within the extreme probability of repetition Delta. Really old backups and Alpha forks with sufficient deviancy are either subject to auditing, or irrelevant."

"How often does that happen?"

"Rarely. Or rather, we shut down one source of instances, and some vault elsewhere sets a new Ego free. Most violent RD cases are through terrorism that hits minors without stacks, or organized crime. High-profile cases. Erasing the perpetrators for good is very, very hard in such circles. The Hounds almost never catch every instance retained somewhere." Togusa stopped in front of the armory doors. "You'd think large and unique in data profile as an Ego file it, it would be easy to find, but it really isn't. The Extranet is a landscape even more massive and convoluted than the physical galaxy."

"So the point is, you do kill these people for good."

"I mean… yeah."

"So like, what's the problem?"

"It's not _there_ , Garrus. It is in what _we_ do, and why. What use are we as the law enforcers, when we are as random and tyrannic as those we want to stop? That's the point. And I'd think you should think about that, too. I'm… sure Bau does."

Garrus said nothing. Next to them, the door opened with a swish, and Togusa took a step inside before turning around: "See you later. I'm probably going to be in the mess, getting something in me." He stepped inside, and the door closed.

Garrus was left alone with his thoughts.

* * *

"I am very thankful for your rapid appearance and that you took care of the mercenaries that attacked me tonight, but I would prefer if ESWAT would depart from my property now."

To Commander Yai Faraji, Pierre Adriens' face screamed masked nervousness, and smelled of reaction-suppressed pheromones. It was the full assault of modern conversation augmentations battering against her defenses, as it could be expected of someone both rich and always influential. The usual colloquence had gone out the window however.

"Sir, you were assaulted by a Private Military Contractor. If you want us to take any punitive measures, I need you to give my forensics the chance to mirror the crime scene. Otherwise my legal hands are bound to eyewitnesses and the reports Leopard Armored Interventions are obliged to reveal to us under the Boltzmann Security Charter, and that will not be sufficient to press charges. I can guarantee you that."

 _And I would like to give another private tool of corporate warfare the boot. The more of this bull we shovel into recyc, the better._

"Commander, the legal repercussions must not concern you. Needless to say, there will be consequences." Adriens looked out over his estate. "These stupid credit-bought barbarians…" he muttered under his breath.

Faraji crossed zhe arms over zhe chest. _Like the ones you hire for your dirty work?_

"Commander, we can take this over", a detective from the New Venice Police Department said. "I can send your department the mirror as soon as it is available."

 _Meaning never._ _I' m not stupid._

Zhe hit the cognitive acceleration, and exhaled zhe awareness into the TacNets Virspace, where zhe team commanders and XO had assembled. "Any comments?"

Jarhet Pereyra was the first to speak, his Avatar that of a turian in heavy armor of transhuman make. His voice render was appropriately flanged, but the human worry came through clearly: "I don't know commander. We didn't see a lot, but our spread of Overwatch drones caught this image:" He threw up a stand-still holograph, stabilized and zoomed in. The heat glare of active atmass engines obscured the view somewhat, but it showed an obviously augmented transhuman lifting a turian Shell, slung over the shoulders, into the cargo bay of the Merc TAV. The shape of a Halo device was wrapped around the head. Going by the fringe, the turian was female. "They made at least one life grab. According to data correlation, that is Valena Sakistire. Not a lot we could find, this is all gathered from Exp-streams and social media activity of other party guests that had her DisplayID signature attached.

"Did you run anything more?"

"Not so far. Should I schedule."

"Yes please." Zhe looked at the rest of her team. "C'mon everyone, this can't be everything!"

"Well… the TAV slipped into FTL. SysCon has a flag on it, but the pilot AI is seriously competent," Sarah Kleipner contributed after a moment of hesitation. "We lost the pursuit an hour in, and I couldn't get SysPat to dispatch a corvette to investigate the area where it was last on sensors. By this time it might be somewhere off the ecliptic, rendezvousing with its mothership. Until we can get Leopard on the hook about their contract, that trace has dried up completely."

"Any traces of gear?"

"No. The Quadpeds are thoroughly slagged by enemy weapons fire, and every retained battlespace asset used capacitor self-destruct as soon as the HTAAV dusted off. We got some peripheral data from the downed NVPD police drones, but that is spotty - And tells us nothing about what went down inside the estate." Skrehlis uplift dolphin avatar completed another circle in the air. "I'm going to continue datamining what streams I can, but a lot of the traffic was crashed the moment the Mercs lit up the front area with NCC. Unless you authorize me to hack into Adriens estate and DS6 systems…"

Zhe waved him off. "Forget it Skre. Much as I would love to, no way I am risking that headache. Or the paperwork, and the shitstorm of pissing Adriens off. Next I know, half the Meths will lobby for my replacement." Zher hand massaged her face.

"...Screw this. Team leaders, we are RTB. Recall all Landmates to the bees, let's get back to New Rome. Let Adriens have his fun." Zhe dropped back into the real.

"How is it looking Commander?" the detective asked. Faraji looked to him, and Adriens. The two had just shared a look, and she backplayed the last few seconds of meatspace activity. The two had had the similar drifting gaze of a Vircom.

"We're… recalling. I'm handing the scene over to you, ESWAT is pulling out. Have a nice evening." Without another word, zhe turned around and headed down the lawn.

[Kalia, IPS suit for pick-up] zhe pinged zher muse.

Down on the grass, one of the suits took a knee and opened up its upper legs and chest area, armor plating folding away to reveal the empty pilot space. Zhe grabbed the handholds, and pulled zherself inside, magnetic attachment points connecting armor and chestplate. Zhe put her hands around the joysticks, and dropped backwards into the link, her body growing and changing from hermaphrodite transhuman to three meter combat armor/robot hybrid. As soon as the armor had locked up, zhe took off, vector jets and CM pushing her into the sky and towards one of the waiting transports, its side doors opening to accept the recalling squadron.

On the ground, Adriens watched the ESWAT commander get out of his way. She was a fine thing underneath all of that armor, he thought. And that tenacious personality… Zamira was due a change anyway. He made a mental note to call Grieffin later. He would no doubt be able to procure a proper AI personality for today's evening. It would be a good way to vent the frustration… and forget the problems.

"If that would be all, Detective Cilento-Lozé?"

"Have a nice evening _signore_ Adriens." The man smiled, tipped his cap, and strode down the lawn, towards one of the NVPD aircars parked on the road up the hill.

Adriens liked it when the police respected him, and then it was easy to return the favor. Detective Cilento-Lozé would be happy for the weeks to come, and so would his children. The billionaire smiled. At least something was still good with the world.

He turned around, and walked the way back to his estate, observing the damage. It would take a good two week to repair everything. The crashed VTOL would require an EOD team to move in first and remove the onboard power cells and ammunition, someone had told him, and the same went for various surprises the mercenariess might have left behind all over the estate. Then came the physical replacement. Interior materials, walls, the plantations… his mansion was terribly wrecked. At least none of the statues had been damaged or even demolished. And the lawn… he shook his head at the burning wreck of the robots strewn about. The lawn was a mess. Getting fresh material that fitted in just the right way… his design bureau would be busy, for sure.

At least his personal estate had just been ruined on the exterior. Though losing the lower bedroom, with its view of the estate grounds and the sweeping hills down the water would hurt. He didn't like to think of the smell that tried working its way into his brain. That, he had filtered out. No need to suffer burned flesh, explosives, and smoldering wood and grass.

Stepping through the doors into the interior, he technopathed his butler to remove the jacket, worked his shoulders with a sigh, and stepped into the central living room. It had already been wiped clean of brick dust, and the mercs' equipment had been removed. Very good. "Miriam!"

She stepped down the stairs, perfect as ever, the smooth silky smile on her face that he always loved. He grinned at her, and she grinned back, showing her platinum-and-diamond teeth. "Well, that was quite the evening, wouldn't you say?" She stepped onto the floor, swaying her hips. He nodded, stepping towards her. "So let's forget the stressful parts of the evening, my dear."

"An excellent idea. Please, sit down."

The voice behind his back made him freeze, and his muse… _didn't automatically toggle the alarm._

Miriam smiled at him, and took his arm. "I like what she says. Let's sit down", she said, brushing against him not quite forcefully to turn him around.

The sudden feeling of ice in his brain, shooting through his veins into his entire body, drowned out his entire arousal. _My implants aren't working._ Sweat erupted on his skin, hot against the cold surface of his physical being.

"Now now, Mr. Adriens, there is no need for that." The sweat stopped cold, and he dropped onto the couch, opposite of the other Shell that sat there, legs crossed.

The foundation was an asari, comfortably stretched out with her long limbs in one of his favorite chairs. But her face was more felinoid with a flat nose, large eyes and differing facial structure, the eyes a deep black filled with holographic stars, entirely without discernible pupils. Claws shimmered at the tip of her hands, and the body was covered selectively by fur and skin, like implanted clothing.

Some part of his mind recognized it as a Sahir Tala morph, part of the current designer chique on the European arm. She smiled. "We are disappointed with you, Mr. Adriens. We had such hopes in you. And then this had to happen."

"That wasn't my fault!" it burst out of him. "What can I do when somebody else hires some mercs to steal something from my vault?!"

"They 'stole' more than that." Entoptic images appeared over the table in between them. "They took two of your contacts too. They kidnapped them." The Sahir Tala's left hand trailed over the edge of an armrest, slicing a curving piece of wood off it at the end. Adrien's eyes followed it to the floor. "A rather specific choice, wouldn't you say?"

"So what?"

"And, their time of attack. Just when you went to the vault. And they only struck one vault."

She stood up in his chair, and the infinite windows to distant galaxies bored into him. "Because _you kept_ _ **a private, unsecure copy of your office conversations.**_ " The hissing voice was demonic, and he sunk deeper into the cushion. He seemed to endlessly fall backwards.

"We warned you. But you just wouldn't listen."

He opened his mouth to shout for help. The Shell smiled. "Oh, I wouldn't try that." Suddenly, Miriam's finger lay on his throat, pressing down on the adam's apple. "Even if, nobody would hear you. So please, don't waste the effort." More chilling fluid in his veins, and the sweat restarted.

"What… what have you done to Miriam, you monster?!"

She smiled, and slowly stood up in her chair. "Nothing more than you have ever done… Mr. Mabatte."

Goosepumps traveled down his back. _How did she?-_

"Do you remember, century ago? When you were young, and adventurous? And there was this desperate girl, on the streets of Kigali? Seeking for a way offworld, a way to a better life? She was fortunate enough to have genetic upgrades, through one of the philanthropy viruses, legacy of Salin Musk Junior, but she had no money. And thus, no future."

Suddenly Miriam spoke at this side: "You promised me that future. You told me, you showed me the great new future that awaited us. And you paid for that one surgery. I trusted you. But I didn't realize that you had something else implanted too."

"And so it began", the other sleeve took over again. "A century of reshaping. At first, it was primitive. A broken soul. And then the tools became more capable. You shaped her mind as you shaped her body. And you were fascinated by it. How malleable it was. How true your theories were, and how they turned into praxis."

"How… how do you know all of this?"

She sighed, shaking her head minutely. "We deal in information. That is how we became as we are. Did you think you are immune to that? We knew everything about you before we even talked to you. We know what you did. We know why they came today, and how they learned everything. Because you were sloppy. And because of you, we were in no position to intervene."

She looked down at him. "Because of you, the plan is threatened now."

"Im… impossible."

"For all your upgrades - that short-circuited egoism, the supposed ability to take the long view instead of the short view, for all the mental upgrades and all the transhuman intellect - for all of that, deep down you are still stupid, still human, just as baseline as those you look down upon as mentally retarded luddites fearing change. How did you yourself say? 'Upgrade or die?'" The morph looked her her hands, inspecting the claws, and back at him. "Well, it seems you were not ready to evolve far enough. You are still _only human_."

"Don't lecture me on humanity, you _thing_! You think you are somehow better than us? After all of what you've planned?! What you have set into motion? What you will do to everyone! You're nothing like any of them! You have forgotten what it means to be us!"

" **I am just as sapient as you are. And far more intelligent than you. Far more wise than you. Do not call me a** ** _thing_** **! Do not lecture me on forgetting myself, or on loss!** " Her eyes were fire, and her claws cut into his legs flesh. He screamed.

The pain cut off, suddenly. Miriam's Shell was running a hand over his chest, cuddling against him. It brought him no solace.

They looked down at him and smiled. "Now, _Pierre_..." a clawed hand ran down his shirt, over his hip bone, and down his knee. "Enjoy the evening." She leaned forwards, and suddenly he felt the arousal again. And as her lovely face came closer, a set of fiery eyes appeared in the windows to endless stars and galaxies. "It is going to be your last."

Her kiss burned like fire, and his Ego screamed as _something_ washed over it like a tide of darkness.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Landmate:** Alternate name for an intermediate Powersuit, or IPS

 **RTB:** Return to Base

 **Zhe & Zher:** Gender-neutral pronouns

* * *

 **A/N:** And that would be it for Chapter 9! Upcoming: Some people getting fixed up, bedside talk, socializing, and setting course for the next destination on the trail!

Also, at this point, I would like to thank everyone that has stuck with Ascendance until this point. It is a pleasure and a motivation having you as readers. Thanks a lot guys, gals and sophonts!


	43. Retrospections Pt 1

[SAIN\\\MIN\\\IV/OUN\\\s9\\\newsfeeds\op_compile\\\ ]

 _"...party was crashed in a most violent way when a group of mercenaries attacked tonight's gala by New Venice celebrity Pierre Adriens. As you can see, the hired soldiers used brutal methods to disperse the cloud, and destroyed large parts of the estate grounds…_ _...The newest and hottest witness XPs straight from the party attack!_ _...you see, this is just another problem with Council law! PMCs enjoy way too much leeway in our space and on Bekenstein specifically, and this has to be curbed…_ _...the cause of the attack is still unknown. Leopard Armored Interventions did not comment. We will keep you updated, at TNS._

Kusanagi's left hand unconsciously played with the thick cable exiting from her casual black clothing as her right hand tapped on the sealed, skin-temperature surface of the conference table. In front of her, the rectangles of a data sifting interface streamed from right to left, slowing down, growing and shrinking. They showed lines of text full of correspondence and product descriptions, spreadsheets of financial transactions and contact data, colorful graphics and polished images.

It was the record of a criminal empire, and she took it all in. _Information is power. And I came for you, Adriens._

She stopped the stream, picked out another two sets of information. Swiftly she created copies, erased details, accessed the metadata files and cleaned them out. To a triple drum of the index and middle finger, the newly created previews were copied over into one of a dozen trigraphic folders that hovered two centimeters above the desk surface. They were labeled "Pierre Adriens Business Leak" 1 through 12.

She felt Bau approach in her expanded awareness, networked into the local mesh, and looked up as he entered through the opening door. He looked straight at her, and nodded, a slight smile sneaking on his face.

She inspected the local mesh a bit more, noted the connected IP, and returned the smile. Then Kusanagi pointed at one of the free chairs, next to her.

Wearing simple, sweat-absorbing sport clothing not unlike herself, she could for the first time take in how modified Bau was below his salarian-looking head. Salarians were usually frail, and all the more sheathed in exoskeletons and synthetic muscle suits when they went into frontline action for that fact.

By transhuman standards, Bau would still be only "well trained" - nothing compared to the bodybuilder physique military cyborgs or biotech-augmented Bioshells had to show off - but his tall frame was beset with thick strands of muscle working under the dark green skin, and the to transhuman eyes unhealthy-looking chest was bulged out with some internal augmentation.

The salarian seemed strangely human in his choice of body sculpture. The other interesting part she had seen nowhere before was the ink. Bau's arms were covered with intricate, alien artwork that curved and crossed in complex ribbons and loops, large enough to be visible but still easily hidden by a long shirt. Automatically, her AIs began pulling the meaning appart. Most of the ink were references to salarian mythology, but expressly modified. Focus stood along experience here, enjoyment besides clarity, the entire salarian philosophy of singular focus and a bright, shining star linguistically modified towards a theme of variance, meditation and experience instead.

 _Transsalarian philosophy? Salarian society tended to stress extreme singular achievement for the greater cause, before modern cognitive tech was normalized by us._

[Quite], her muse replied. [Even with the modern 80-years baseline of the biological body, salarian society hasn't shaken off the philosophy of tight dedication. Bau seems to be a deviance from that.]

 _Interesting._ The link transmitted a silent feeling of agreement and shared curiosity.

Bau looked at the visible interface she had manifested. She was aware as the salarian extended his own mental interface, and clicked on one of the folders. There was a rapid stream of file accesses, then the salarian finished his inspection and turned to her: "Despite the casualties… I would classify this as a good operation."

"Decisively. One hard down and one seriously injured… I've seen worse, especially for how we crippled ourselves. If we'd gone in with the full edge, I think we might have been able to ghost-freeze the entire DS6 force where they stood."

"Really? Have you done this before?"

"Yes. Two times with JSDF peacekeepers, a few times during the Verge Wars, three times with Section 9. It takes finesse, and a lot of computing power on your end, but you can cyber-lock an entire enemy force." Bau continued looking at her.

[Would a practical demonstration be more apt?], she sent at him through a hacked NeuroCom channel. Something that felt closest to amusement returned over the link, and then it was slammed shut as the controlling intelligence countered her hack.

" _Very good_." He nodded at her.

"Thanks", she replied proudly. _I surprised a Spectre!_

Emotions rose, and with them an old muscle memory. She smiled fondly, and it felt good to feel the facial muscles contort, have the skin stretch. Memories from the past, and with them came a sorrow of loss.

The smile faltered.

"Is everything alright?", Bau asked her, leaning forward.

She shut him out, purged her face. "Yes."

In that exact moment, Togusa stepped through the door, Batou, Saito, Ishikawa and Voto'Leelas in tow. The three returnees from the field all wore the same uniform clothing - military exercise shirts and trousers, the Section 9 logo stitched on the breast and shoulder sleeves. Togusa had an injector cuff wrapped around one arm, with two bags of salines and regenerator mix slotted into it. Saito on the other hand had a visible bulge running around his abdomen, indicator of the medical wrap below the shirt. Both he and Saito were also chewing on large OptiMeal biscuits, a general foodprinter solution for providing nutrients, vitamins, trace substances and other desired compounds in simple, easily created packages.

Ishikawa still wore his casual shorts and was nursing some kind of drink from a standard-issue memory foam cup, and both Voto'Leelas and Batou were doing nothing - the former was shrouded in his Envirosuit, the later looked as fresh as ever. The damage to his combat armor apparently hadn't carried over onto his body. He looked at the Major and nodded: "Good to see you all back in one living piece. Aetheis especially." He turned to Bau saying that.

The salarian nodded. "Thanks. Which would also be because of your successful intervention."

Batou shrugged: "Just doing my job there."

"Nonetheless, my thanks. To you as well, Mr. Togusa, even if I am repeating myself."

 **[ Chapter 10 - Retrospections ]**  
[ 21st May 2232 ]

"...this concludes the main operations review."

Visibly relieved, Bau dropped into his chair, and looked at the clock. Two and a half hours in.

"Overall, despite everything, I would say we did a terrific job as a largely unfamiliar team with reduced capabilities."

Itakela groaned from her position at the table: "Just promise me we won't have to pull this kind of stunt again any time soon."

Bau gave a tight smile. "No. I at least plan to follow our separatists wherever they go. Speaking of which…" he turned to Kusanagi, "did my request for surveillance go through?"

"I guess that's my part again," Ishikawa supplied and stood up. The main wallscreen cleared of its previous content, and was replaced by five images. One stood a bit apart from the others, a by now very familiar turian female's face. The tag next to it said "Captured."

"With one separatist secured, we have the remaining four of our nice little group." With a gesture of the hand, the female picture faded away. "Vellus Quantius Laetus, leader. Furina Enninus, potential Second in Command. Altari Teliminus, and Luxi Trajerea, position unknown. Possibly security, though we lack a hard confirmation on that."

The images zoomed upwards, and a map appeared. The familiar layout of Adriens' estate was at the center of the white-on-black layout. A group of red dots pulsed in the center.

"After we acquired them at the party, I dropped in a surveillance tag request for TITAN/ARGUS, under our covert surveillance link with the SAIS. They left the estate not 5 minutes after we departed via a private aircar, first going north, then heading south towards _Nouveau Venice_." The map zoomed out, and a single dot drew out a flight path, following the airlanes over the Nouveau Venice terraces.

"Half an hour in, they stopped at what we now know was their hotel; the Venice Interstellar. Quite interestingly, the four turians who left the tagged aircar there had different IDs, and different faces. Their kinetics also didn't produce full matches anymore." The map zoomed in, and a holographic surveillance image from a scanner over the hotels aircar entry appeared. It started just as four turians disembarked from the aircar, which took off on automatic, and headed towards the hotel.

"Wait a moment…" Voto'Leelas said, pulling up the other images on his ARO. "Different clothing, different faces, even the cuts are different… why the heck did they run around in the clear at the party?"

"When exactly did you get the IDs?"

"Well, when they were with Adrie- oh." The quarian slammed a hand against the side of his helmet. Ishikawa nodded. "They didn't. If it wasn't for our own surveillance gig inside Adriens' estate, these fine sophonts would have slipped right through. By the way, officially they were representatives from Boustere Arms Corp, out of turian space."

"Boustere…" Bau said thoughtfully, eyes focusing into infinity as he called up data on his ARO. "Interesting. Those IDs have to be forged. Excellently forged at that."

"Got any suspicions?", Borma asked.

"Probably the Italian Mafia", Paz hazarded. "For an exact look I'd need an in-depth look at the IDs themselves, but the Sachrazi family has had a long-time deal with the indian New Mumbai _Karim Mudaliar_ for a big NLAI cluster they have running somewhere in the indian Bulk. I know Section 8 busted that gig a month ago, but we didn't catch what IDs were forged, so there's likely a few hundred if not thousands like these running around."

"How is that supposed to work out anyway?" Batou asked.

"Depends", Paz said, rotating a pen in his hand. "A lot of the IDs were 'foreign sophont' IDs - they're registered with the INIDDA through local authorities in the border systems and then perched away through backdoors into the DatAdmin sections. You need a lot of processing power, hence the NLAI cluster, to forge some of the data, and clearance or TITAN/CERBERUS will slap you silly, but it's a pretty consistent breach in our side. Interior defenses aren't as strong as you'd like and external cyberdefense is eating a lot of CERBERUS currently allocated processing budget. Basically, they're dummy accounts, and because surveillance ends at the border of transhuman space there's not a lot of ways these IDs can be flagged as actually being false. Plus, freedom of travel under membership in the Citadel Alliance. Getting your ID revoked takes a lot."

"So much for the fabled ASIs", Itakela remarked. Paz nodded sourly, but Ishikawa pre-empted his reply: "Ideally, we'd need twice the posthuman brainpower to start containing this, but even then… it's the transhumans who are the weak points. Same problem as always. And having them in the loop is a statement about ASI controllability, an assurance to insiders _and_ outsiders alike." He gave the turian a pointed look.

"Let's get back on topic here", Kusanagi interjected. "Ishikawa?"

"Right. Our new guests entered the hotel. 20 minutes later, they departed for the spaceport. There, they entered a private frigate again registered to Boustere Arms Corp, over Traskin Spaceflight Operations. The same frigate is now heading for turian space on a speedy flight plan. The registered transfer system is New Valencia, to Kisaleves."

The city map was replaced by a map of star systems, a yellow line outlining the registered flight plan, red where the frigate was currently reported. Bau looked at the waypoint marks and their timestamps. "How likely is it that we can catch up before they do the transfer?"

"Not likely", Kusanagi supplied. "We'll have to talk this over with Captain Akio, but she's a frigate, we're a cruiser. And she had a multiple-hour advantage on us, too. Combined with the messenger drone launch and the need to offload our supporting Bioroid team… we're very likely not going to make it. But I can request that New Valencia SysCon delay the transfer slot, though I have no idea if they're going to hold onto that or start rabbiting the moment we try to pin them down."

Bau lapsed into thought. "...I would really like to interrogate our captive before that. When do we have a chance for a tightbeam com?"

Athena chimed in: "That would be in 16 minutes, Spectre Bau, when we prepare for the next Relay transfer."

"Good. I'm going to fire off a Spectre Covert tracking request for that frigate. After that, I'm frankly going to catch some sleep. It is after midnight on our sleep rhythm now, and I want everyone to stay fit and in rhythm." Everyone nodded, through the transhumans exchanged glances. Bau picked up on it: "I know, there isn't a lot of demand - but my team members need their rest."

Batou shrugged: "Hey, it's no problem. In the meantime, Ishikawa and Borma can start cracking our lovely little package. Also, before we all head for some sleep, remember what I asked? So, what are your answers?"

There was a silence in the room. Then Togusa started. "I guess as the naive newcomer from StarPol, I have to say that this was somewhat uncomfortable. We _could_ have taken this in an official raid with undercover agents. I know we had our reasons for laying down a false flag and ensuring that maximum force was used against Deep Six Solutions to avoid a scrub, but on the other hand we have some class-A super wizards as hackers. I think we could have applied our capabilities more effectively, and avoided the collateral damage we caused. Not to mention, the need for skulduggery, which will inevitably slow down interdepartmental coordination. But overall? Yeah, I said we did the best with how we approached it. But we could do better in the future."

Raven joined in next: "I guess Togusa kind of has a point, but considering how we had to play this by ear due to the fluid situation of the HVTs and the data vault's location, the false flag served us very well for preparationary work - the hacking of Adriens' entire infrastructure to get intel would have raised eyebrows without a proper warrant, and considering we had nothing concrete against him…

„Furthermore, it is pretty obvious we only busted part of the deal. For the moment, the enemy parties should be relatively oblivious or at least unsure that they have a Specter and Section 9 on their tail. Frankly, this looks like a double cross on Adriens' part. So yeah, we did good, I would say." She looked around.

"Considering what I found in Adriens' vault…" The major picked a trigraphic cube off the table, and threw it into the wall screen. A wave of windows spread over the surface.

"He was in everything. Weapons. Combat Tech. Cutting-edge explosives and war micro- and nanotech. Augmentations, Morphs, support medical technology. From the high-tech to the cheap and illegal knock-offs. And…" she made a sweeping gesture on the table. Behind her, rows after rows of files appeared.

"...Wait a moment. Those aren't Egos-"

"They are", she confirmed. "Everything from military and criminal LAIs to napped military Egos. I cross-referenced some of the Neuroprints. Adriens smuggled Alpha forks of military back-ups from various Systems Alliance Office of military Medicine and Augmentations Back-up sites through a pipeline of psychosurgical conditioning and pruning before selling them to external-space interests. Mostly Bioroids but… there are several low-order SpecOps Egos among the files I downloaded."

"Jesus." Togusa ran a hand through his hair. "How many?"

"Thousands. And judging by the licensing documents attached, he sold fork-enabled copies."

"Fuck!" Batou's hand slammed on the table. "You're saying there's probably tens of thousands of our people running around out there, their minds lobotomized, as disposable fighters for some fucking warlord in the Traverse or the Terminus?!"

Kusanagi nodded sorely. "Quite likely."

"...Fuck this guy." Batou shook his head in disgust. "You're, uh, doing something with that."

"Yes. Adriens will not get away with this _shit_."

Garrus shrugged. "Well, can't say I was sorry before, can't say I am sorry now." His hands dropped in his lab. "Adriens fully deserves what is coming for him. So fuck yeah, we did good!"

"Anybody else?" Kusanagi looked around, then visibly glanced at the clock display again. "Right, then that's it everyone. Dismissed." She deactivated the media systems of the room.

In a second, the dark infinity of the rooms walls shrinked back into its actual dimensions, and turned to their stand-by chrome-white coloration. The indirect lighting at the edges transitioned from a cold blue to warm yellow, and the ceiling mount activated again. Togusa rubbed his eyes momentarily at the change of conditions, then stood up from his chair and stretched slowly. He made a strained sound.

"Definitely heading out to eat something. Anyone else?"

Garrus stood up. "Would have nothing against some more. I'm not augmented like you all, so…"

"Oh, more here know that part than you'd think", Ishikawa waved off. "So don't stress it."

"Besides, just because we full-body cyborgs don't require much subsistence doesn't mean we don't enjoy it. Everyone here remembers their organic times, and you haven't abandoned your cuisines either despite food printing."

Garrus tilted his head in a sign of agreement. Unseen, the Major froze for a moment, then picked up her pace and went through the door first. Togusa looked after her as she headed down the corridor towards the cross connector and went to the left, where the staircases lead into the upper crew quarters and operator accommodations. He glanced at Batou, who shook his head ever so minutely. [Let's not talk about this now.]

Togusa turned to the turian: "Anything I can get you?"

Garrus shook his head. "Already ordered myself. But thank you." Togusa nodded.

As a full-blown Special Operations cruiser, the _Nagato_ had space for a mess to spare. Some 600 meters in main body length, excluding the aft engines magnetic containment fins and the forward sensor, even with her surprisingly streamlined design, the _Nagato_ had a comfortable 100,000 cubic meters free for her crew accommodations and pressurized storage.

When Section 9 had acquired the _Nagato_ , various spaceframe capabilities had been retrofitted for the organisation. The aft housing modules for a Battalion of Espatiers and a platoon Special Forces had been downsized, given that Section 9 never deployed over company strength at best, and space had been made for additional housing, several levels of cutting-edge workspaces, and an expanded holding and interrogation set-up. The CIC now housed an additional cyberwarfare section aft, and bulk room space had been dedicated to additional servers.

During the entire chain of retrofits, the secondary crew mess for embarked passengers had been turned into even more of a kitchen than it had been before, with extended open cooking space and a large gallery mile. It was partially open to the crossing access corridor that defined this part of the floor, and when the three entered it two of the food printers were already humming away, stitching together proteins, hydrocarbons and fats.

Togusa stepped at the dispenser next to them and drew two Universal Eating Tools out of one slot, before busying himself with glasses. They had recently restocked on the easy ceramic fabware, and now a collection of turian, asari and salarian drinking items stood next to human fashion. There wasn't a lot of difference everywhere, but the turian glasses showed subtle tweaks clearly intended for the lower finger count of their hands. Placing them under the drink dispensers, he ordered his own selection - simple water - and let Garrus make his choice.

While fluids gushed from the nozzles, he threw the UniEaters onto the table, letting the white sticks with their silver ends spiral on the top. Garrus tried stopping one with the tip of his right index claw, and missed. The stick smacked against the side, and Garrus yelped in surprise, shaking his right hand.

Batou broke out into laughter, and fetched himself one of the chairs to sit on, legs spread and arms resting on the lean. Garrus pulled his mandibles in tight in a gesture of embarrassment. "Please don't take that badly", Batou pressed out.

Garrus gave a forward shrug of his shoulders: "It's okay." He looked as Togusa walked up to the table with two plates full of food, sniffing the air. His pupils dilated ever so slightly, and he hunched forward to catalogue the smell. Batou looked on fascinated, and somewhat glad that his Sleepless Eyes hid away the stare of his phantom eyeballs. In this moment, at the smell of meat, the turian showed a surprisingly predatorial side.

"There you go." Togusa dropped the plate and two bowls in front of the turian, and dropped his own food. "What is that?", Garrus asked. "It smells… well, strangely like nothing." The turian grabbed his UniEater and pulled it apart around the center. The smart matter separated like a strange gum, and began forming into eating tools.

"Fried curry rice base with chicken and omelet, mostly," Togusa said. "Rich in proteins and simple hydrocarbons, for the muscle regeneration. And it has a lot of chili in it, compounds of which you can't smell, so that is probably why it seems deadened." His tool had shaped a fork, and he started digging into the hill of mixed food in his bowl.

"It's not", Batou chimed in with a smirk.

"Hey, fuck you for giving me the idea and then packing way too much chilli in the recipe you send over." Togusa punched Batou's arm.

"Hey, what can I say, I like it sharp… and it was a good demonstration of your new abilities after the upgrade", Batou shrugged with a grin.

"My throat was still sensitive for a few hours!", his friend protested around a mouthful of food. Batou's smile got a little broader in response.

Taking the first of the bread loafs and letting it soak up the rich sauce (both typical of turian cuisine), Garrus turned to Batou: "Where's the tradition coming from anyway? The "did we do good?" thing", he immediately clarified.

"...You really are fascinated with that part, aren't you?", Togusa remarked. "I thought you are a cop? A turian cop at that."

Embarrassed, Garrus scratched his fringe. "I don't think I qualify as a good turian."

"Yeah, I figured that", Togusa replied dryly, dropping his fork on the rim of the bowl. "You like to play a bit fast and loose with the rules when it comes to getting the bad guys."

The turian looked at his food, then snapped back to Togusa: "Yeah, I do. But you can only see so much bureaucratic red tape keeping people from getting the help they need and locking the fucking assholes behind bars, and the inrush of all the aug tech hasn't helped at all. And people like Adriens? They're the kind who slips through the net with a smile and a wave, because they have the connections and the lawyers and enough grey area support to wipe away the obvious traces. And because C-Sec doesn't use advanced sapient AI at all for crime analysis, we're stunted trying to catch up." The turian took a deep breath, and realized the two transhumans were staring at him. Then he followed Togusa's gaze to his hand.

Unconsciously, his claws had raked across the tabletop. "Uh, sorry guys."

Togusa and Batou exchanged a glance, and Garrus got the feeling they were having a silent conversation in that short moment. Togusa's eyes jittered in place in a strange manner he recognized as a sign of cognitive acceleration. While the brain was firing extremely fast, peripheral muscles were limited in response. When the brain tried to move the eyes unconsciously, the fast acceleration led to the eyes jittering in one position instead of naturally roaming through a space. Then they turned back to him.

"I guess you deserve to hear the real reason", Batou began.

"Normally", Togusa took over, "I'd just have said that it was me who brought this ritual here. To a degree, that's true. I got where I am by playing by the rules, and not trying to ride outside of the system - where you are either risking turning into a vigilante, or something worse - or worse, being a corrupt cop. These days, where social favors matter the most, our police force has an increasing problem with greasing. Especially as these very people are the administrators. The AIs may be as perfect as ever, but they are under human control. So naturally, any exploits focus heavily on the human element, and both our instinct to socialize and seek advantages and the demands of our society help them along."

Batou spoke up: "You know I was part of OP BROKEN ANVIL. I lead the Rangers force during the pre-assault infiltration of Torfan, provided cover fire and ultimately broke the central bunker complex alongside the 501st SpecCybOps. Killed a lot of batarians that day. The media declared it as butchery, but honestly? Torfan wasn't a problem for me. The fuckers we killed in that bunker were either legitimate combatants or bloody slavers who'd _also_ started a PsyOps campaign under our nose."

Baou leaned back in his chair. "No, I started asking myself that question because of a lot of other stuff we Rangers did during the second Verge War. You might want to settle back, this is going to be a bit of a longer story."

"I'm listening."

"It all started in the May of 2226, almost six years ago. The 23rd was the day the attack on Elysium began…"


	44. Retrospections Pt 2

"Did you know the war was coming?"

"No. HighCom kept a very strict lid on the matter, and there actually were CensorBots active in the network. Scuttlebutt was carefully controlled and filtered, yet the message caught on.

"But even then, it was clear we were bracing for a storm. The Army staged in the spinward heart of the American territories, and rallying at Fort Capricorn Space Base… we were one of 200 Roosevelt-class Orbital Assault Supercarriers staging there. 200 cutting-edge supercapital transports, loaded for bear with interface assault and cargo craft and millions of soldiers. And that was a small bucket in the Systems Alliance overall fleet power, especially when it came to transports. These beasts weren't as maneuverable as the combat craft, but they didn't need to be. The Army could take its time, but when it arrived…"

"I get the idea."

"So, Elysium was hit." Batou settled back in his seat, having turned it around so he could lean back. "And obviously, everyone was sitting in front of the screens…"

* * *

The crew was lounging around in the public spaces of SSV _Allot_ when the breaking news hit the networks. The newscaster was Samarj Kamais, in all her young Indo-African glory, a colorful Sari stitched with holographic motives wrapped around her Shell. The camera was coming down towards her as the graphic of GNN Breaking News played across the center of the holograph.

"Hey, guys, shut up!", Absco shouted over the murmur of small talk and card games, raising her bassy voice. Batou looked at the ticker. "-tack on Elysium in progress-"

 _Wait, what?_

"Breaking news on the world of Elysium and the Vetus system at large. A large mercenary fleet has just been confirmed to have transitioned through the Verus-Charlie Relay from the Hades Straight." Behind her, a colorful map appeared, outlining the familiar constellation of star clusters and the lines of Relay connections between them. To the "east", trailward, a red line marks the territory with the Verge transhumanity doesn't officially control, the band of the Hades Straight imposing itself on his mental vision over unmarked stars and connection lines.

"As we speak, an orbital engagement around Elysium is ongoing. Systems Alliance officials of any kind have not commented at this time, but orbital footage analysed by our experts-"

"Yeah right", somebody remarked in the crowd. "Experts."

"-seem to indicate that the local garrison is being overwhelmed."

"Go go 6th!" another voice shouted with the guttural inflection of a chimpanzee.

"The Revenants strike back!", they all thundered at once. They may be the fucking Spacy, mother of the Espatiers, but against the Verge's slavers and warlords, they're all one.

"Hey Sir, you know anything about this?", somebody turned to address Batou.

"No." He forced himself to lean back in the couch, shaking his head. The light of the holograph newscast played on his Leupold Optical Systems, stimulates the complex field sensor arrays within. Ever since the augmentations, looking at the images hadn't been the same. The "Sleepless Eyes", Ranger Custom, were optimized for field recon and combat action. In consequence, the eyes would see through the waterfront illusions of holo- and trigraphs, as they do now. "Sorry, but… I didn't know this was going to happen."

"Well I bet someone did. This entire mobilization thing stinks like a prepared counterstrike."

"You're saying the Consul would hang Elysium out as _bait_?" Karon-303 spat.

"It wouldn't surprise me, no. Besides, it's Elysium. The fucking _Navy_ can make the batarians regret coming there."

"And what about us?", it came from the door. More service people had piled in to see the broadcast on the big screen. All-around, DisplayIDs showed rising social media activity.

"I tell you what's going to happen with us!", Aiden shouted from his position. "We're gonna go and fuck them batarians up! Big time!"

" **Hoorah**!"

* * *

"I'm pretty sure the 455th weren't at Elysium."

Batou nodded. "We weren't. On Elysium, the Rangers would have been worthless. It was all heavy infantry and defenders, and the counterattack was lead by the Espatiers and the TOAs. Rangers lead the way. So that is what we did.

"On the 26th, the Consuls held their speech, and the swords were unsheathed."

"What is that about anyway?"

"It's an old gesture, from way way back in the 22nd century actually. Back when the Systems Alliance was more of a regulatory agency, just becoming more of an independent… something," Batou waved his arm vaguely in front of himself, "one of the first Consuls was from the American Space Navy. A former Admiral, actually. One of the things they carried over from the blue water force was the tradition of officers with ceremonial swords. When he became Consul, he made a bit of a point out of the 'sword and shield motive' until you arrived at a strange hybridization of western and eastern swords. Long story short, at some point it became a custom to unsheath the swords whenever the Systems Alliance was fighting in some major war. As a reminder that out there, people were dying."

"You have to keep in mind", Togusa interjected, "this was during the… 2140s?"

"Something like that."

"-back then, cortical stacks were theory. There were the first incremental back-ups, but nobody had managed to find a portable and durable solution yet. But practical biological immortality was already there on the table. So death was even more of a tragedy than today."

Garrus shook his head. "Sounds like crazy times."

"Anyway, on the 26th, the Systems Alliance went to war. They were still cleaning up on Elysium when the 1st Fleet came up from coreward, and suddenly we were moving. We passed through Vetus, and into the Hades Straight. It was just an onpour of ships."

"I remember that actually. Some turian military channels had parked a media ship with some big telescopes on the other side of some Relay, and it was just transition after transition. Thousands of ships."

"H-hmm. Two days after Elysium, on the 27th, I made my first combat drop on Pritaris." Batou saw the recognition in Garrus eyes. "Yes, that Pritaris. 6 hours after the Espatiers punched in, we were loading up and interfacing down. And after that…

"You gotta realize, there wasn't a lot of warning. Pritaris was something like a secondary staging point for the Hegemony, once they had Elysium. Think that's how their idiots in high command dreamed it up. The general populace had no warning at all. Their armed forces were still scrambling when the 1st wiped the System Defenses out of the sky and started the orbital bombardment. It was chaos on the ground. And where chaos is, casualties start piling up."

* * *

The horizon was on fire. Beyond the city perimeter, at Spaceport 19, another hydrogen fuel bunker went up in an air-shacking explosion in the wake of a screaming red-orange meteor, the trail of the orbital bombardment munition detonating the volatile oxyhydrogen mixture. "Damn", he muttered under his breath.

1000 meters his muse announced.

 _Parachute at 150 . Target is house 23455._ Everything in the city was numbers. Roads, blocks, houses, vital infrastructure - even City 06 itself, and the continent it was on. Just numbers in a war that was already eclipsing simple comprehension. Next to them were armed forces, civilians, percentages of the batarian castes.

 _Reduce number one from 50,000 to Zero. Number two from 5 million as low as possible. Liberate number 3._

A group of Peregrine Multi-Purpose UCAVs shot by closely overhead, invisible and near-inaudible, only perceptible by the synthetic proximity sense and their BattleNet IDs. A moment later, one of the sleek machines loosened a swarm of Anti-Armor missiles into the city below. Three hostile armor indicators blinked off in red crosses, destroyed by the attack.

"Stand-by chutes…" He watched his altitude indicator. "And deploy!"

The chute was automated and controlled by its own Sub-AI, and at 150 meters the metamaterial cloth was catapulted from his back by the cold gas charge, unfolding smoothly along memory polymer lines. The same moment the element zero cores of his jump pack dialed up, and he reduced speed from terminal velocity down to an easy 5 meters per second.

Below him, the rest of 1st Squad was already spreading out on the roof, ditching the parachute rigs and decompacting their weapons.

Batou hit the floor hard for a baseline, easy for an augmented cyborg in combat armor, and gave the mental command to unhook the parachute from his bag. The smart cloth would take care of itself.

"Second fireteam, take the lower floors." He made a gesture at the roof access door. Crossbow gave a thumbs up, shrouded by his own thermoptic camouflage, and gave his team another gesture. Makesei flashed an OK, and held a cloaked hand up the doors lock. The trigraphic interface glitched for a moment, then the door clicked open.

Using geckopads and augmented strength, another soldier pulled the door open as silently as possible, then the pointman pushed in, carbine up. The team filed in behind, still going slowly and carefully.

Two minutes later, his com chirped. [Lt, we got one family below. House is cleared, no danger. Moving onto the street.]

[Check all, one family, all clear. Did they say anything?]

[Huddled in the ground floor Sir, lower caste. One male, one female, two children lower age class. Sensors on them as per SOP.]

[Good man. Out.]

"I got movement down the street", Kail murmured inside his helmet. With a digital beep, a few of the red threat overlays blinked for a few seconds as he highlit him. "Six, seven on visual. Foot Mobile."

"Gear?"

"Colonial Army. B-20 Armor, BM-32 Rifles. Three launchers, can't ID the specific type."

"All of them are carrying some mighty big backpacks. Two are different through. Looks like ECM."

BE-2033 Jamming Suite and a BE-1088 Anti-Air Radar Set his muse made the ID for him.

"Gotta be an anti-air team", Batou murmured. [1st fireteam, shift right and get eyes on that enemy patrol. 2nd, eyes on the right street side. 2nd Squad, are you in position?]

[Affirm. In position at house 30072, secure.]

[Get eyes on… reference mark house 23464. Enemy anti-air team, moving down towards us. I expect them to set up in the neighbourhood.]

[Copy that.]

Now Batou could make out the sound of conversation over the bang of artillery, the thundering explosions, and screaming aerial vehicles. His muse automatically adjusted the directional microphone arrays, activated audio enhancers, and overlaid translation software.

"-they're living near the spaceport. I hope they are okay."

"Cut the chatter, lowborn!", a voice growled, warped by a vocalizer. "You, you, in there!"

"Batarian Army, open the door!"

The pick-ups shifted, and Batou heard the whimpering from the inside.

"Open the door, or we will break it down! For the glory of the batarian people, this household _will_ serve its defenders", the warped voice of the team's CO commanded.

Batou rolled his phantom eyes. Batarian officers could be very melodramatic.

[Stand-by to engage.] There was more noise from inside the house, washed out by the sound of a flak emplacement going off in the neighbourhood. A moment later, a pair of HMVs screamed out of the overhead clouds and detonated, and in that moment an armored foot kicked the door in. The screaming intensified, and the batarian unit pushed in. _Fuck!_

[Hold, hold!]

[Sir-]

[Hold, I said.]

[Holding it, Sir.] Kail's anger was audible in the Neurocomm.

 _I need a thermal scan of that house._

Retasking Recon assets now. Stand-by for image.

20,000 meters above, a Darkstar-9 Recon drone turned a few dozen of the hundreds of arachnoid sensor eyes studding its belly to focus on a new position. In Batou's ARO, new holographic shapes appeared, inside the house. Scanning in the far infrared, the Darkstar-9 resolved activity inside the house through its walls. The armored batarians stood out by shape and emission profile, and…

[Fuck, that's an extended family spread out over both floors.]

"What are they doing on the second floor?", someone on 3rd Fireteams circuit asked. One of the batarians was doing something with his hands.

"Setting explosives. Looks like they are-"

The figure stepped back, and an explosion blew out a wall.

"They're setting up a firing position under the cover of the roof." The pieces fell into place.

Batou considered, then decided: [Stand-by to engage. ] He sighted in on the roof, and more and more laser-like blue entoptic lines connected weapon muzzles with where they were aimed at. Several batarians appeared one of them checking the opening, then nodding. [Stand-by…] Batou clicked off the safety. Two batarians appeared again.

[Engage!] He pulled through the trigger. There was a fusillade of shots, and the two batarians dropped as several red ablation lines intersected with their bodies. The barriers flickered into place, then fell again as their aging sensor systems failed under the sudden onwash of engagement ECM raining down from the swarm of drones above.

Then, a round pinged into one of the ammunition backpacks. A bright yellow explosion ripped through the second floor.

"Ah fuck!" All of the Rangers ducked back into the cover of the roof wall, snapping the safeties back on as rifles slipped off-target.

Bricks and mortar dropped off the street. Then Kail looked back up. A fire was now smouldering in the house. "Hoooly Shite!"

* * *

"I'd like to say that was the only time it happened to me, but it didn't. All the damn time, ammunition blew up inside homes. And depending on how lowborn the people were, the forces fighting there might not even care about Evac. Some sick idea that if they forced us to create more casualties, the war might stop on political grounds, maybe. We never really found out what the specific reasons where."

Garrus swallowed more meat. "I mean, it certainly made things more difficult for you. But that's not where the doubts came from, was it?"

"In part, yes. I mean, it was still people in that home. When that ammo pack went up, it crushed two children and a mother below; an uncle was maimed. Two days later I had my muse search after the fate of the inhabitants. Turns out the father tried to shoot at some of our people at a checkpoint and got tasered and arrested. And this is how it all starts all over again. Fathers and Sons killed in an eternal spiral of violence. Not that we witnessed much of that. One week later, the 455st were lifting out again, to a new battlefield.

"But the real doubts started appearing a few months in." Batou looked at Garrus. "Given you talked about the backlash before, I assume you know of the suppression campaigns."

"Yeah, but- oh."

"Yes. As Elite forces and airborne infantry, the Rangers were quickly drafted in for the business of tracking, securing and… handling enemy leadership and targets of importance. And we were good at it. I loved it. But with the time came the doubts."

* * *

In the morning rain, the house was a barely visible dark silhouette on batarian visuals.

Batou clicked the vision mode away and went back to enhanced visual, and its sides peeled themselves out of the fog and dense curtain of raindrops that got everywhere.

"Another two, far side. Near the woodstacks", the comm squawked. Batou mentally thumbed his "check" light and shifted his phantom eyes to the left.

[I think that's all of them now.]

Batou nodded slowly. [Agreed. Anything more on their vision gear?]

[Definitely thermal optics, but their gradient detection is shit. They'll see our muzzle flashes and the rounds, but not ourselves.]

[Good. Everyone, take your targets.]

[Gotta shift right, give me one.]

He clicked his "OK" light again, and sighted in on one of the sentries. The batarians were patrolling in pairs, cautiously looking around, weapons up and at the ready. They knew a transhuman strike team would come.

Against Killray Type-X909 Thermoptic Camouflage sprayed onto every piece of weapon and large equipment, they might as well have brought their Mk.I eyeballs.

[On target.]

[Hold scopes…] Batou checked that the indicators on his ARO were all ok,[...fire!]

16 silenced rifles sighed, and 48 guided subsonic flechettes ripped open the armored heads of the sentries.

"Move in."

Fourteen ghosts separated themselves from the ground, and stepped forward into the open. The Rangers moved carefully, selecting every step they made, and ensuring they didn't block the blue entoptic aim-lines of their covering brothers and sisters.

"Movement inside the house", Ethan-3 reported. Holographic outlines appeared on everyone's ARO.

[Two headed for the door.] Four muzzles swung on target, the steps slowing to a crawl. Wet black mud squashed under the rubberized boots, droplets of liquid and dirt spurting against the legs, creating artefacts in the thermoptic camouflage. Rain sputtered against the thick clothing, dripping off sights and raised weapons. Perception jacked up, cognitive acceleration neurotech working on full power, the Rangers waited.

The door opened slightly, and a sensor grenade was chugged out.

A single shot rang out from the cover positions, and the device was shattered into debris while still in the air. The shapes recoiled, and more motion ensured inside the house. The image was fuzzy, but after three seconds, nothing had happened.

"...Move up."

The Rangers resumed their cautious advance, began circling the house in. Batou breathed calmly, mind alive with considerations and possibilities. "Prepare to take the house. Crasher-5, stand-by with active scans."

At that moment, the front door was ripped open from the inside, and two batarians in heavy semi-powered armor stormed outside, guns up and firing on automatic, one sweeping his fire left, the other right. The Rangers dropped into crouches immediately and returned fire, two guns per target. Stealthed slugs sighed through the air and into heavy armor plating.

A burst of SAW fire from Reaper-1 ended the short engagement decisively, sending the two figures dancing under the impact of hypervelocity rounds.

Inside the house, a heavy machine gun cut loose, ripping through the wall to the right of the assault fireteam. [Down!] The four rangers dropped on their backs at once as brick dust, splinters of wood, plaster fragments and hypervelocity death shot over their heads.

Batou snap-reacted: [All active on the house! Clear for suppressive fire. Keep the HVTs alive for download!]

[Stand-by banger!] One of the Rangers retrieved an armor-piercing-cabbed flashbang and slotted it into his underbarrel launcher. [Shot out!] The projectile launched with a "thunk!", smashed through the remains of the house door, and detonated its scatter charge inside the house a moment later.

[Go, go, go!] More Rangers were there, slipping out of their thermoptic camouflages and turning into military-black shadows instead, firing more stunners and gas rounds into the house.

[Ready breach!] One Ranger threw himself in position next to the door, denting in the wall.

[Breach!] A foot came up, and kicked the swinging door solidly out of its hinges. [And in!] The pointman, a bulky Eth3n android, pushed through the door frame and into the interior. "DEACTIVATE ALL ARMS AND GET ON THE GROUND!" he thundered from amplified loudspeakers.

[One of the HVTs has the HMG!]

[Tackle.] On his ARO, Batou could see the entire action unfold with textbook action, precision and the certain disregard for enemy fire only androids and full-body cyborgs developed. Weapons were grabbed and hoisted skyward, arms blocked and knifes caught, and in two cases the Rangers simply resorted to breaking a few bones and wrenching an arm out of its socket to bring their targets down. One other combatant was chugged out through a window, where another Ranger shot him in the helmet. Then, a moment of silence.

[Crasher-6, that's all HVTs secured.]

"Good work Sergeant. Everyone, move to phase 2. Biotech Specialist Mahanti, get to work."

"Yessir!" Batou rose from his own position, and deactivated his thermoptic camouflage. All around the objective, Rangers and their support flickered into visible view.

Easily, Batou stepped through the high grass and low bushes onto the clearing, boots squishing on the mud, two mules following in behind them. Sapier and Coldblock also stepped off, the two IPS drivers in their spindly recon suits repositioning to cover the single access road.

Batou looked at the one corpse inside the debris field of glass. "Ethan-2, was that really necessary?"

"Sorry Sir." The combat android appeared in the door, moving his shoulders. "Just wanted to work a bit, and he hit me across the head." The snap-on helmet covering the Synthetics head had a big blast crater on the right side.

"Ethan."

"It won't happen again."

"Good. You and the rest of Fourth, set up in front of the house. I want one Trophy Pylon in case they try to slag the HVTs while we make the downloads."

"On it Sir."

Behind Batou, Mahanti was working on pulling his heavy gear pouches off the mule that had carried them since insertion. Batou stepped through the wrecked door into the house proper, and took in the location.

Whoever had designed the house had done so with the certainty of defending against military ambushes, he decided. Low caste homes always had open corridors opening into the lower hall in order to allow easy breaching. The altars with the Pillars of the Tenants and one or several status of the gods were moved to the side, commonly next to the wardrobes, and there was no altar to Kazmensh, the Guardian of Doors.

By contrast, the higher caste homes always had a central altar that blocked easy access to the home proper, and statues of Kazmensh were often at the center, his fiery eyes looking down on any intruder. In some cases, the statues had actually been home security robots, cleverly hidden away.

But this house was way too out of position for a lower caste home, and lacked the infrastructure to boot. But the entire layout didn't scream higher caste either. The lack of separate sleeping quarters for the "servants", just for one.

 _This definitely was created as an out-of-way command post. Just by whom? Has the Hegemony been more paranoid than we suspect?_

Batou looked down at the secured HVTs. Two Rangers were still aiming guns at them, with Immobilizers attached to the batarians bodies. They'd been laid out on the floor, with a good meter of spacing between each, so they were out of each others immediate reach. And one of them was cursing up a storm.

"You think you're so strong, huh? Behind your masks and with your fancy cybernetics? The Hegemony will break you! Your worlds will burn, you hear me, burn! You will serve the rightful heirs of the Verge, you will be shown your proper place in this grand galaxy! You-"

"Yeah, yeah", Batou said bored, his voice warped by the helmet voice module, "we get it. In two years, Elysium will be yours forever and my children will serve you drinks until they die. Could you at least be original? Such as rich mythology and no references? I mean, c'mon, have some style." He kneeled in front of them, then gave Biotech Specialist Mahanti a nod of the helmet. [Rig them up and start the mirroring.]

[Right away.] The Specialist fumbled around with one of the backpacks, and opened up its lid to reveal the computer and storage unit. Several thick cables of hyberband fibre-optic lay on top, neatly bundled together. Then the specialist opened his other pack, and pulled out the first of the military-grade field Ego bridges. Then he pulled a second and third bridge out of the pack and laid them out on the floor, inspecting them for surface damage before activating each one.

With a series of clicks, the armored casings opened up, extruding the complex skeletal framework of the Ego bridge proper with its headrests, interface pads and neurotopography units. Then he moved over, and Batou helped him place the first unit around a batarians head. "Wait, what are you doing?", he asked. He heard the shuffling around himself, the warm touch of something against his head.

The third batarian recognized what was going on just as Batou lifted him up so Mahanti could push the last unit into position. "You wouldn't! That is a crime against sapients-"

"Such as slavery? Don't kid yourself, DNA samples will also be taken. Once your interrogation is over, you will be issued a new body fresh and without charge. Not something that can be said of your victims-" Baou watched Mahati link up the thick hyperband cables between the units.

"I fight for my people! I fight for our independence from the Council and its lackeys, I fight for our right to self-determinate! I fight because my daughters are _dead_! _Really dead!_ Do you even know what that means anymore, you zombies?!"

"Nice speech." He turned around. [Start the upload.]

Batou stepped outside, the curses of the batarian still following him.

"I don't fight for slaves!" was the last excalamtion he heard before the voice drifted away in the rain.

* * *

Garrus was silent. "I… I had hoped that this was a myth", the turian finally said.

"Officially, we never confirmed that we conducted uploading of captured enemy personnel… but we did. There's just no more efficient way than bringing back a captured Alpha, and as batarians almost never had cortical stacks, we had to do the Ego retrieval… the old-fashioned way. With a scanner."

"Wait, did you just scan, or…"

"Scanning. Afterwards, we… neutralized… the captured batarians. The Ego bridges just shut them down."

"...Wait a moment. There was an accusation you were using neuro-targeted retroviral attacks against batarian personnel due to various cases of strokes and heart failures. Was that-?"

"Maybe." Batou shrugged. "I never looked into the specifics of these operations. I stopped asking questions… and then, after a while, I asked myself what I'd done that day, and many other days."

Togusa chimed in. "Hundreds of captured batarians commited suicide after their release. Many of them left notes behind indicating they saw themselves as shallow copies and zombies of their former selves, revenants walking the galaxy with no future among the halls of the gods."

"Spirits." Garrus worked his hands over his head. Shock was etched on his face.

He looked up: "And that wasn't a violation of sapient rights?"

"By a definition applicable? No. We didn't fork them, they were interrogated in a non-psychosurgical manner, and they were resleeved when not in high-quality simulspace holding. But the consequences..." Batou looked away. "When you've lived and died and resleeved, the word 'death' gains a very different meaning. By the time that operation happened, I'd lost four bodies, and two of the times my brain had been destroyed. I was resleeved from my stack. So I never… I never considered what we did might break so many. But then it did happen, and… I started reading into the specifics of my cases, asked around, used some of my pull. The further we advanced, the less and less we captured military commanders, and more and more… just desperate people. People who wanted a future. Who'd lost loved ones and their possessions in orbital strikes or aerial attacks. People who just couldn't see us as the good guys. And when that happens…"

"There was… other stuff. We had adolescents fighting, sometimes with suicide vests chock full of simple chemical explosives and ball bearings. During the battle of Ves Bareks we had to kill kids… because we lacked the crowd control to nonlethally subdue them. A few squads got themselves wiped in ambushes and the hesitation to engage them.

"And wherever we went, the further it went… the more bloody it got. We killed thousands of soldiers, _each_. And we all started to question if this was still worth it. The psychologists assured us that this was good - nobody wants soldiers without morals and consciousness, blood-seeking killers. But the way the war went, we died a dozen times and came back up… and put a dozen times us into the ground for good. And it all just started to blur out.. and then I began asking myself how far I was willing to go for what gain.

"And that is where that question comes from. War turns men into monsters. And I won't be a monster, I never want to be. So after Torfan, after the war was over… I quit."

Garrus was silent. Batou looked him straight in the eyes, and Garrus searched for something in the depths of the implants. For a moment, he could have sworn to see something else than cold composites and diamond materials. "When people like us get free reign, bad things happen. So we have to keep ourselves in line, or we must be kept in line. Our power carries responsibility, especially now. And that is why I want us all to take our time for retrospection."

The tales of the second Verge War, now five years past, carried Garrus into his sleep an hour later. For half an hour, the turian turned from side to side in his hammock before finally finding rest.

Just as Garrus Vakarian fell asleep, a resolute expression slowly emerged upon his face.

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **Ego:** The wholesome mindstate of a person, encapsulated in the brain.

 **Ego Bridge:** A combined neural scanning, neural stimulation and neural wet-printing system used for down- and uploading Egos from a biological Ego Executive Medium.

 **HVT:** High-value target

 **Interface & Interfacing:** Refers to the act of transport between a planet and an orbiting spacecraft. An "Interface Assault" is an attack from the orbit onto the ground. More general than "re-entry" or "orbital drop" as Interfacing can also be applied to space colonies or asteroids with low gravity or no atmosphere.

 **SAAF Navy:** Operating the waterborne arm of the SAAF, the modern Navy mostly operates combat ops on major water/fluid worlds, ice moons with subterranean oceans. On major habitable worlds, the Navy maintains fleets of anti-orbital and ground/air support submarines/carriers as part of the Alliance's comprehensive space defense strategy for major worlds.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** And that is our first insight into the backstory of one character, and into the Second Verge War.


	45. Retrospections Pt 3

The distant ancestors of the salarians had been light sleepers.

Developing a particularly supercharged metabolism - evolutionary rooted in a rather unique intracellular assimilation of not just one, but two species of bacteria that had developed into something human biologists would classify as mitochondria - as a means of defense against the hostile environment of Sur'Kesh swamplands, their neuronal networks had been hammered into high-performance logic machines on the anvil of evolutionary selection, matching rapid throught to rapid body speed.

The ultimate consequence of that was that when salarians went to sleep, their brain was even more busy cataloguing the day's experiences and "defragmenting" itself, cleaning up neural connections and selecting and assigning long-term memory. Combined with other quirks of the neuronal architecture, the end result was vivid dreaming bordering on hallucinogenic visions, filled with warped and mutated events of the living world.

The salarian mind was also hypercharged in association. Backed up by an (augmented) photographic memory, it made for potent revisions of old events.

 ** _Light. Space. Heat._**

 _Aethernia 7X thrumms at 100 dB over the dance floor, sending the young partygoers twitching at 160 PBM. Molten entopics snap to faces, follow hands, ID the physiometrics. Hyperflux is the most common return, a designer nanodrug that's cheap overclocking neurotronics mated to various feedback loop modifiers. The make-yourself-salarian party drug of the new age, and its working. **To the pulse of the clup trigraphics, hot distortions travel through the room, washing across Bau'sface, sending shockwaves through his flesh.**_

 _He had wondered idly how many asari will be in the hospital tomorrow with nerve scarring cases, or worse, nerve strokes. Neurotronics leave few spaces for fudge-ups, and Hyperflux can range from top-notch self-assembly designs fresh of the cutting edge of nanodesign down to soap-produced AfterWare that was originally intended for muscle site delivery. **Twitching. Heat under the skin. The dissolution of the skin andself. The endless expanse of the Others. Memory of youngertimes.**_

 _[Possible hit on target], Karea pings from his position in the crowd. The salarian-sleeved-asari hovers at the edge of the main floor, elaborate drink in hand._

 ** _Everything drops to bass notes, melts way in a wash of color.  
_**  
 _Then suddenly, everything spins out of control on speed dial. Bau gets thrown back, barriers flaring into place as a shower of hyper-accelerated metal explodes in the crowd._

 _His right hand splits open to reveal the unfolding shape of the pistol inside the cybernetic holster, shifting forward to be grabbed. The ARO is flooding with combat graphics to maximum density, and red outlines appear everywhere._

 ** _Red. Pain. blood. Screams._**

 _20 minutes later, he holds two bloody stacks in his hand._

Bau opened his eyes to the sound of the alarm clock going off softly beside his bed, combat augmentations spinning up on reflex mode as he oriented himself in the here and now. His visual implants immediately lit up the room in shape-enhanced night vision, red lines drawing out the drawers, items and wardrobe, the crumbled mess of his sheath and the shapes of his own body beneath. A single short LIDAR scan flirred through the room, and found nothing.

Then he caught up with events, and exhaled steadily, willing his heartbeat down through biofeedback techniques. As the natural beat fell down into more acceptable parameters, he inhaled again, pulling in the world around his skin, centering himself in the world.

[You should consider suppressing that more] his Muse remarked.

Bau exhaled again, deactivating the vision enhancements and standing down his body from combat mode as the lights dimmed up. [It would only mean I have to sleep longer. Right now, I can live with a few bad dreams.] Bau stretched slowly, working the musculature out of the night's stiffness with some well-placed stretching. [And this was another time I got operators wounded or killed in my line of work.]

[Neither is this the first time Aetheis was downed on a covert operation. She knows the risks. Maybe even better than you want to acknowledge.]

[She's someone without the safety of cortical stacks, or even an off-site back-up. Her hard augmentation threshold is absolutely minimal. I know she survived 550 years in the business, but… I'm worried that one day, she may push herself too far.]

[When did you start developing that cautious streak?] his Muse teased.

[When times started changing for real.] He pulled on the simple shipsuit that was hanging in front of the automated wardrobe.

It was 4:31 transhuman standard space time when Bau stepped out of his cabin, and into the corridor. The lights were dimmed down, with only one smooth highlight at the point where Bau stood. He stopped and listened for a moment as the door slid close with just enough sound to not be unsettling. The craft was quiet. There was no roaring sound of engines, all absorbed by the bulk mass of the cruiser and the non-existence of any kind of effective mechanical coupling between the searing hot plasma exhaust and the engine cowlings. The atmospheric recycling worked on magneto-aerodynamics and large-area exchange units that breathed through the corridor walls, and the paragravity systems were all solid-state hardware. An element of active sound suppression and muffling, detected by his countermeasure suite, rounded out the sensory quit.

Bau stepped off towards the aft exit from the crew quarters, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling "windows" of entoptic graphics that covered what he knew were hatch- and marking-covered polymer panels surface-formatted to look like wood. Combat cruisers like the _Nagato_ had some mass to spare, but the transhuman designers had clearly remained economic. Armor and propellant would be taking up most of the mass, followed by arnaments. In terms of mass budget, the accomodations were an afterthought, a few percentage points on a very large spreadsheet.

Bau passed by nobody sapient on his way to the aft connector and Vertical Atrium. The only other moving thing was a flat-based, multi-armed cleaning and maintenance cyberpod, slowly gliding across the floor on its floor-washing base while pairs of arms tended to the widespread plant pods and vertical gardens.

The medical center was buried in the deeper part of the crew habitation module, aft of the CIC pod in the heart of the SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_. It was bracketed on both sides by the two access corridors that lead into the armories and aft mission bay, This area was lit in full daylight, and Bau encountered a single transhuman, who have a courteous nod and "Spectre" greeting before moving forward.

Stepping into the airlock, Bau endured the current sterilization protocol and the sweep of the ion purge, Kiggs-field-contained cold plasma washing over his frame before the lock allowed entrance into the bay proper.

Aetheis was hovering directly on the over side in one of the intensive care tanks, her naked form framed by a dense forest of cloth-sealed robotic arms, cables and tubes inside the liquid. Sterilizing UV lighting illuminated the neutral-flotation gel and the dense patterns of nanobot laser communications that danced inside of it.

One of the robotic arms moved sluggishly through the gel, trailing a dense spray of nutrients and stem cells as it moved over the chest area in rhythmic, scanning motions.

Bau settled down on the chair that scurried towards him on mental request, and settled down besides the tank, at head high, watching the entoptic vitals hovering on the public node in front of the glass. Connecting to the mesh node, he activated a second option, and the medical equipment vanished, replaced by a semi-transparent render of the asari's body.

She was still asleep, and it was probably for the better. The transhuman nanotech worked fast, but invasively. Strands of it extended like technological fungi from the skin down into the deep tissue layers, squishing the power, data and material transport structures of motile nanorobots between the cell walls so they could work on fixing muscle tears, tissue damages and neuronal scarring.

A deep cluster of nano- and microrobots was working on the bone, infiltrating new hypercharged regenerator cells into the damaged areas via ultra-fine temporary channels, accumulating in a tumorous-like mass around the fracture site where they pulled together and stabilized the bones. More nanotech was working on soothing the tissue trauma surrounding the sites.

The arms looked much better now. The skin was fulls repaired, with its minute asari sheen, and the ugly black blotches of blood underneath the skin had vanished as well. Now the nanobots were putting the finishing touches on the muscle fibres, blood vessels and neuronal tracks in the area.

Armatitius was in the next tank, already out of surgery. The turian had his will for these cases noted down clearly. Regrowing the organs, skin and plates would have taken days. In such cases, he had pre-selected for cybernetic reconstruction surgery, always the dutiful turian soldier _and_ believer in "earning his metal", as the turian traditions went. Now the biomimetic prosthetics covered the flank and hid away the synthetic tissue weave and new, artificial set of turian lungs inside the torso. Save for the rosy edges that were still healing, nothing gave this particular part of cybernetic surgery away.

And on the far side of the room lay an immobile transhuman body, largely nacked safe for a pair of underpants, a transhuman ego bridge wrapped around its head. The killed bioroid Clarke was getting sleeved in his replacement body, fresh out of the tight ranks of the reserve body bank.

Bau knew that Doctor Obe'e ARvatar was standing behind before she spoke: "Nais T'Lairo is doing well, Spectre Bau. Four more hours, and we should be able to decant her."

"Anything in particular?"

"Not really. I've seen and fixed worse cases of biotic damage. General damage too."

"...Did you serve during the Verge War?"

"Nothing that fanciful, I am afraid." She stepped into his field of view. "But I dealt with the aftermath. Fixing up more than one asari slave at New Los Angeles, kitting broken nerves, brains and Egos back together." Her golden eyes drifted into the distance. "Before that, I did community work. Traveling with _Médecins Sans Frontières_ through transhuman space and beyond. Helping fix up the poor and the helpless, the junkies and young kids who burned themselves on the inrush of new drugs and BTL chips."

"...Is that why you chose to look so old?", Bau asked carefully.

Her smile turned to him. "In part. You do of course realize that appearances are just another statement of what we are below." Her blue hand reached out and touched his chest, and the entoptics made it feel real. "I saw in three decades more real pain and loss than most of my people did in a century. We're a very differing culture, Spectre Bau. But most people have not seen what I have seen. I feel old, in a way most of my people cannot, especially of my generation."

"The post-contact one, you mean."

"I was a young girl when the galaxy opened up to us, Spectre Bau. Young, and wide-eyed and awash in the buzz of a universe so far larger and more diverse than we had ever dared to dream. And then I saw reality."

"...I admit, some part of me couldn't see transhumans as this… experienced."

She snorted. "Why, because we're all living the good life, resleeving every week and orgying ourselves senseless?" She shook her head. "That's a nice mass media image, but not the truth."

Bau leaned back on his chair. "Some say you crippled yourself. You could have the singularity by now, infinite worlds at your fingertips, the threats of the physical universe locked away."

"Maybe. But would we still be ourselves? We two certainly wouldn't be talking." She pointed at herself and him.

Bau smirked. "You are overselling what this conversations mean to us both. We aren't friends."

She shook her head. "We are sophonts. And that is all it takes. I'm not bound to this form anymore than you are. A salarian full-body cyborg and Spectre. A rare combination even for your kind. One with resleeving experience at that, too."

"And you-"

"Obviously. Do you think I was born blue?"

"...I considered it a possibility. I don't know much about pre-contact laws", Bau admitted.

"Morphological freedom and autonomy extends to babies and kids too. I was born a Alpha baseline, healthy girl to parents. They were both bioroids, fresh out of their contracts, and they wanted to fulfil that other very human part- nursing offspring. We were such a happy family…" She smiled. "We still are." She looked at him. "How much do you know about family?"

"We don't have them like you do. We won't for a long time even if we wanted. So I knew my father, and his friends and clade. I grew up surrounded by other males, guided by the females."

"A very matriarchal society."

"Yes. Though I never found something particularly wrong with it." He glanced at her.

Doctor Obe'e waved him off: "I won't judge that. So?"

"Salarian society is… focused. We never had much time to live. Before the advent of medical science, many males didn't live beyond 20 galactic years. Then it turned 30, 40, edging into the 50s. Then we slowly started pushing the boundaries. 60 years. 70. Now it's at 80 years per body, and still a bit rising. It used to be longer, but once full-body rejuvenation and transferal became options, keeping one alive forever longer just wasn't economical. But by that time, the model of singular dedication to one goal in life was etched in deeper than the canyons of Raves. Only as a collective could we advance - The individuals task was to contribute part of the great weave of the wheel."

"So even we were still taught to focus on one thing, and one thing only. The House of the Baus is famous for our soldiers and spies. Only the Grand House of Solus has a greater claim to the tradecraft of espionage. But as time went on, I asked myself: Why? Why submit to only one goal? Especially now that times are changing? The salarian people needed to be flexible again. So I went out of my way to become flexible."

The transhumans eyes flicked to his tattoos. "And yes, these are connected to that", Bau confirmed. "I'm the first of a generation growing up with the prospect of an entirely new way of life. The salarians have to change, after all this time."

The ARvatar looked at Aetheis, at the tank for Armatitius next to it, and back at the asari. "...I wonder what she would say on the matter."

Bau looked at Aetheis. "To be honest?" He made eye contact. "I don't know."

* * *

 **Glossary:**

 **ARvatar:** Entoptic Telepresence Avatar

 **Entoptics:** Direct, multi-sensual Augmented Reality overlays rendered onto normal reality. Essentially indistinguishable from normal reality. Entoptics are however primarily defined by their physical anchoring within the world, contrasting with more vision-anchored HUD applications.

 ** _Médecins Sans Frontières:_** Also known as "Doctors Without Borders", MSF is a transhuman international non-governemntal organisation specializing in medical humanitarian aid, especially in developing and/or war-torn regions. The modern MSF has developed into a massive medical NGO providing all forms of aid in many areas, including at home and since 2199 also abroad.

 **Ravens:** (spoken with short 'a') A salarian colony, originally more lush, devastated by the Rachni Wars and subsequently re-terraformed. Its southern Plateau complex is home to a series of high-altitude canyons well above the dense lower atmospheric layers inhospitable to normal life due to the high density of sulfuric gases on the lower plains.


	46. Retrospections Pt 4

[SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ ]  
[5:12 Shipboard Time]  
[Passenger Habitation Module]

Voto'Leelas rolled around on his bed again, and stared at the ceiling.

"Way too spacious", the quarian murmured drowsily, luminescent eyes blinking under the opacity of the Envirosuit's faceplate. He had to drug himself into sleep using his Neurotronics, after an hour of trying to find sleep in the luxurious accomodations of the transhuman starship. And now, his head was complaining about the second neurochemical wrench of the day, following hours of intense Direct Neural Interface usage for hacking.

[What's the time?]

 _5:12 Shipboard. Shift change is at 6_ , one of his VIs replied.

He blinked the attached ARO widget away, and glanced around the room. The accomodations were clearly designed for long-term habitation; large drawers, personal closet space, the attached part that allowed you to shower in private comfort. Overall space expenditure: that of a medium-size hotel room.

On the _Kaleisani_ , the same space would have served an entire family: father, mother and a few children. The space used for the bed alone could easily house the volume of four sleeper pods, and in zero-G, the effective available space for one person multiplied several times.

He could almost see Leyn, feet anchored against the "ceiling" of their little variable-G apartment, looking down at him with her ever-present smirk until he'd catapult himself against the ceiling. It had been their spot to decorate and use, a childrens paradise of physical toys, mini-fabbed trinkets, and layers upon layers of mesh-hosted entoptics made visible and tangible through their suits.

He smiled at the memory of good times. Ultimately, it was all he had.

And all he had to honor, as a quarian.

Voto'Leelas took his time to quickly order the sheets himself. The personal AI he knew was assigned to the room stayed mercifully silent, respecting his ritual of ingrained resource conservation. Why have a machine waste extra time, space, energy and processing power on something you yourself could do quickly as well? The cloth straightened out easily along its memory lines, anyhow.

He hurried out of the door, and headed for'ard, considering his options on the menu.

"Well, somebody is up early," a khelish… female voice said. He whirled around.

A quarian woman in an Envirosuit was catching up to him, her eyes contorted in the shape he recognized as amusement; the swing of her hips was ever-so-slightly provocative.

" _I didn't realize another species-sister was doing her Pilgrimage here_ ", he replied. He inspected her suit.

" _Life can be full of surprises",_ she replied with a smirk. He nodded and activated his systems, checking datapoints quickly.

" _Quite so…_ Ishikawa."

The entoptic hack crashed together like a house of cards when he cycled his virtual OS to one of the redundant backups and disabled the entoptic Mesh feeds from the _Nagato_.

The transhuman who stood in the place of the quarian smirked playfully, but with a sense of respect according to the AR kinetis read-outs. "What gave me away?" he asked.

"Inconsistencies. Your _reik_ was mostly good… but you screwed up the _Levlase_ and the _Tashiki._ They are from completely different fleets, and the belt reik is a colonial insignia. It can happen, but it's a very... colorful history to be shown in the open. And then your NetPrint was way off. The _Levwada_ cross-check especially was… well, not good enough spoofed. Which is very good, because if you managed to hack that we would have a problem."

Ishikawa nodded. "Damn shame you looked through it so early. But still, I fooled you - at least at the start!"

"That you did." Voto'Leelas gave him an intentionally strong pat on the back, and the transhuman stumbled before he started laughing.

A moment later, somehow, Voto managed to join in. "So, you're something of a prankster?" the quarian asked.

Ishikawa looked up. "Wouldn't have been armed forces if I wasn't. We Infotechs have a reputation to uphold."

"Such as?" Voto casually asked, rummaging around the massive NetBite the Nagato stored for when it was off-tightbeam for transhuman memes.

"Uh, lemme think…" Ishikawa scratched his beard thoughtfully, allowing Voto'Leelas to step in front of the food printer. "M'kay, so this was way back in '95. I was with the 22nd, big drone warfare outfit for the Systems Alliance. Most of the enlisted staff and NCOs, and the specialists, we were all script kiddies, hackers, the works. People who liked working with Direct Neural Interfaces really down and dirty, who had an affinity for getting the mind close to the data and not using much conceptual folding. Anyway, that breeds a certain mentality."

"So, building backdoors into everything was standard. We had this officer type, stuck-up idiot from some earthen War college, who started giving Tracy and co shit for a bunch of camo work they did. Reprogramming the adaptive camo to display pin-up art in stand-by, flashing obscene gestures mid-exercise battle, that sort of stuff. So uh, we started having... issues with Cybersecurity around him. Spam got through the firewalls, one day he got hit with a bad DancePrank virus that made him make an arse out of himself in the officers' quarters. His entoptic wallpapers got replaced with anime artwork - that was Davison, kid was a genius with neural network sabotage and injecting malicious code into harmless-looking information."

Ishikawa stepped forward, and raised his hand at his own food printer, giggling. "And then, one day- WHAAAHA!" He jumped back in surprise as the entoptics exploded in his face, the entire ARgraphic space of the food printer and surrounding wall filled with high-fidelity animated memes. Glowering, he turned around to Voto'Leelas, who had innocently turned around: "Oh, you-"

"What?" He grinned, baring his teeth.

" _This_ is going to have consequences", Ishikawa said with narrowed eyes.

"Good." The quarian cracked his synthetic hands provocatively, playing over a classic knuckle cracking SFX over his external speakers to augment the gesture. "I need competition."

"Game on, ye bastard." But Ishikawa's eyes were alight with mischief, and he nodded approvingly before starting his morning meal.

Feeding OptiMeal pellets into his chewlock, Voto'Leelas opened the artenduary app and checked the entries. "We're starting interrogations today?" he asked.

"Ayup", Ishikawa replied. "Soon as we can get Aetheis out of the tank, that is - Bau wants to have her on her feet when we start going on the turian. And our transhuman's still in decryption - that'll take a few hours until the SASA gets back at us."

"Can't they be faster?" Voto'Leelas asked on impulse.

Ishikawa shook his head. "Nope. First! There's the bureaucracy with its priority files and explanations and potential warrants. And second: we're talking about a Mindstate file here. Fully backed up Ego. That's one of the most complex and data-dense file formats in existence, and it actually encodes dozens of data subtypes. Connectomes. Vector Data. Electric Charge Maps. Endocrine Mapping. Peripheral Nervous System mirrors. Essential augmentations and DNI profiles, which in itself is like, six or seven data formats. All encoded with a big bloody cryptographic key. Be glad we can crack this stuff at all. All in 8 to 10 hours from delivery to decoding."

"...Fair point."

"Not worked much with this kind of cryptography before, I hazard?"

Voto'Leelas gave a hollow laugh: "Where, on the migrant fleet? I wish. Nobody throws away a quantum cracker array. Those who got one were whisked away to Fleet Intel faster than you could look. And well, mindstates are kinda sacred things. Even messing around with a static fork of your own, or that of any other person for that manner, is seen as dishonorable."

Ishikawa hummed throughtfully. "Runs strong in the culture, eh?"

"We lost… so much when Rannoch fell. Tikkun housed the majority of the _Lavwedaya_ servers. The voices of our ancestors, so painstakingly preserved… and lost to us forever." The quarian was silent for a moment. "Some cultural scars run deep. We lost our ancestral home, our best-developed Biosphere, the security of the Per'Seus Veil, and with that our political power. The collapse was close behind."

"Looks to me kind of like your focus on your past will ruin your future", Ishikawa said.

Voto'leelas mulled over that for a moment. "How did you deal with it?"

"Sorry?" Ishikawa looked up, and swallowed whatever he was eating.

"You had effective immortality since the... 2080s _Anno Domine_. Record lifeblogging and personality simulation was a thing before then. How did you avoid that? Your society never calcified. Right?"

Ishikawa dropped into his seat. "Good question. Way before my time, too. I'm a child of the Eternal Generation, same as almost everyone here. Aramaki is the only one I know who comes from way back before Stacks."

"And he never talked about it?" Voto'Leelas asked. "I mean, you did serve together, or something, right?"

Ishikawa seized up for just a moment. "Yeah, we did. We did." He sounded defeated.

Voto leaned forward: "Look, if you don't want to talk about it, it's fine. But like, you dealt with it, so why can't we either?"

Ishikawa nodded: "Fair point. But to be honest? I guess our answer was to not let our past define us. I cycled through five employments before landing here. Actually did some time as a simple artisan, doing handcrafted woodwork. Yeah, I know," he said, "I don't look the part. But you don't have to let anything define you. Your past are memories and skills that yes, define you. But you can be someone else, in the future. A new You, new experiences, new friends and joys. If you stay strapped in your past, you'll only calcify, until you're so rigid can't move ever again. A statue, not a living being."

"And maybe doom yourself to repeat your mistakes."

"Who said we had to be perfect? Mistakes is how we learn. _Nothing_ was ever perfect from scratch. Certainly no consciousness ever created had its structures defined in perfect shape from day one. No, it was created by trial and error, by _evolution_. By change. And I think you can embrace that."

Ishikawa leaned forward, and his eyes bored into Voto'leela's mask, before drifting left and right to where his cybernetic sensor units were mounted. They narrowed ever so slightly, and Voto realized the eyes had to be cybernetic to look through the refectory layers.

"You _have_ embraced it," the transhuman stated matter-of-factly.

The words choked off inside Voto's throat, and suddenly his heart thundered nervously.

"Yeah," he finally said. "But I also want to honor my people, and our culture."

Ishikawa nodded: "Who doesn't," he murmured under his breath.

They finished their meal in silence. Ishikawa stood up, and slapped Voto'Leelas on the shoulder. "Still gonna be four hours before we start any interrogation. Whaddya say about getting a glimpse at the beast?"

The quarian considered it. "Sure, why not. Gives me more opportunities to prank you", he remarked, and winked when Ishikawa turned around to him.

"You can try youngster, you can try."

* * *

[SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ ]  
[9:16 Shipboard Time]  
[Detention and Interrogation Module]

 _How did they find out? How did they find us?_

Furious questions danced around inside Furina Enninus' skull, insistently rising up from the dark pools of her mind to the surface she tried to calm through meditative exercise.

 _I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will stay strong, for my people and my cause - How did they find out? Who betrayed- I will stay strong, for my people and my cause._

The turian woman breathed in and out, frequency fluctuating with tension. Absentmindedly and nervously, one of her claws tugged at the Biosuit she now wore, a utilitarian one-piece suit in a sickly orange color that hurt her eyes and sensibilities. Everything else had been taken by the time she had awoken, shot up with normal tranquilizers - her omnitool, specs, the back-up weapon, and half of her cybernetic modules. The rest was effectively dead, the user interfaces locked out to her.

With zero entoptic overlays, she felt extremely naked, just like in the resistance-to-interrogation training. The withdrawal of data was eating at the edges of her mind, but she resisted the urge to give in.

She couldn't give in.

 _I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will stay strong, for my people and my cause._

"Furina Enninus, stand up please."

For a moment, she did nothing. Then she slowly opened her eyes and turned her head to the left.

The cell was as spartan as her clothing - white polymer walls and floor, a single sealed light at the top, the necessary sanitary facilities on one side, a spartan bad on another. The access was marked by a thick wall with a single inserted, angle-opening door.

Now that side had turned entirely transparent, or looked like it at least, showing two anonymous humanoids. These ones didn't bother with any presence of armor or clothing - the "clothing" was their skin, beset with a few strategically placed grenades, a long solid nightstick at the left hip and a large, decompacted pistol on the other.

The four black tentacles that sprouted seemingly passively from their backs promised absolute bodily control if the matter got out of hand.

Enninus stayed put where she sat on the floor.

"Furina Enninus, stand up please. This is your second warning." The voice had gotten a bit sterner and menacing, but there was not one note of frustration in it.

 _I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will resist every step of the way, and I will give no step willingly._

"Furina Enninus, stand up please. This is your final warning." One of them activated an omnitool, orange trigraphics appearing around his left cuff.

"Or what?"

Now the two… guards… robots… androids… avatars? showed a reaction. They looked at each other for a moment, then the guard with the omnitool looked at her. "Very well, Furina Enninus. As you are resisting handling, we will employ somatic neurocohercive measures to transfer you safely and with minimal harm to interrogation."

And suddenly, her legs started unlinking themselves from the meditative pose, arms pushing back so stabilize herself as she stood up. Enninus tried resisting, but it was like she had been cut of from control below her head; the muscles moved smoothly and easily on their own accord, steered by a phantom presence. They lacked any of the usual jerkiness of a VI controller; this was entirely smooth and experienced. Some part of her brain panicked, and she felt a wave of rising vertigo and unease.

Her body turned and stepped towards the door. She came to a resting position, and she raised her arms and spread her legs. Three seconds later, the door hissed open, pulling inward and to the side. Out of the corner of her eyes, Ennunis caught the thickness of the frame - the entire cell was thickly armored, probably strong enough to contain an explosion of it came down to it. Or a ragging Krogan.

Her body stepped out into the corridor, and turned to the left. At this point, the guards grabbed her arms and walked her down the corridor. She tried looking to the left and right, as far as the somatic hijacking allowed her to, taking in the location. There wasn't much to see. The entire area was visually sanitized, safe for the presence of sets of doors to the left and right. At the far end, a single door apparently allowed entry and exit from the holding area.

To her right, another door hissed open, sliding away with a solid I. Her body walked inside, and the guards followed into the interrogation room. A single chair stood on one side of the table, fixed against the floor by a set of rails. Possessed limbs settled her down, and the guards snapped thick cuffs shut around her ancles, before attaching her arms via handcuffs to the table itself.

Without another word, they left. A moment later, Enninus felt her limbs relax as the foreign control withdrew from her body.

The hard blue eyes of the turian settled on the far side of the room, and the one-way transmission she knew was taking place there, trying to spear her invisible interrogators.

 _I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will resist every step of the way, and I will give no step willingly._

A few subjective minutes later, the other door hissed open, and two humanoids stepped inside. One of them was a salarian, the other was an asari. Both wore simple Biosuits with cosmetic clothing over it, in the case of the salarian some pieces styled like light armor across the chest, upper arms and lower legs. The asari wore a simple jacket and tight black trousers with silver highlights.

The two settled down opposite of Enninus, and both dropped a set of thin Dataslates and flimsy smart paper sheets onto the surface. The salarian activated both of his pieces, tabbed around on the surface for a moment, then looked up.

"Hello, _Trelja_ Furina Enninus. My name is Bau; I am with the Citadel Alliance Directorate of Special Tactics and Reconnaissance."

Enninus' pulse quickened. _Shit._ She forced herself to concentrate on her mantra. _I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will stay strong, for my people and my cause. I will resist every step of the way, and I will give no step willingly._

The salarian gave her a mirthless, cold smile. "You are currently being held aboard a Systems Alliance facility under Spectre authority, as per the SA-ratified Treaty of Serminius, Article Six. We are holding you for, among other things" - the salarian gazed down for effect at his slate - "membership of a Citadel Alliance-recognized terrorist group. Illegal falsification and assumption of identities without registration with the Systems Alliance for the purpose of conspiracy and/or committing capital crimes within Citadel Space. Conspiracy. And participation in the smuggling and distribution of illegal information weapon systems with the ability to serve as an a) weapon of mass influence, b) weapon of mass data manipulation, and c) weapon of mass cognitive alteration."

He learned forward, his dark eyes challengingly fixating her own: "Let's talk a bit about all of that that."

* * *

 ** _Lavwedaya_** : The old quarian project for backing up life records and the translated and simulated, later emulated, mindstates of their ancestors and advisor constructs generated from them. Almost completely lost with the fall of Rannoch and the Quarian Home Systems.  
 ** _  
Levwada:_** A quarian successor project to the old _Lavwedaya_ system, in life and death.  
 ** _  
Trelja:_** Formal turian feminine pronoun. Smiliar to "Madame" or "Miss" in english.  
 ** _  
reik:_** The unique stitched patterns addorning a quarians Envirosuit decorative clothing. The _reik_ denotes ship of birth and service, as well as other big milestones of the wearers life.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** Now, official and for everyone... up front, sorry for the Radio and posting silence; real life was busy keeping me busy. But I am back, and so is the story!

As always, feel free to like, comment and follow. Every post that you liked the story, every bit of constructive feedback and/or wishes, and every discussion keeps me motivated to move this forward!

 **A/N(Nick):** Check out the GitS: Ascendance Side Story: Re-Itteration!


	47. Retrospections Pt 5

"Subject has been transferred and secured. Your ball."

Paz stopped fumbling with his interface headset for a moment, and reached out for the entoptic comm hovering over the table. It came towards him helpfully, and he hit the push-to-talk button, feeling the haptic resistance at his finger tip: "I hear you."

The hard-faced transhuman tapped twice on the table, activating the nano-communication system in the cell's single suspect chair. Dropping back into his own comfortable one, he cleared the interface cables from his back, and settled the bulky headset over his ears. "Jack me in," he commanded his muse.

[Launching SRAM Interface]

The door to the room was pushed open and Togusa hurried in. "Sorry I'm late!" the ex-detective panted as he dropped into his chair.

"Hey, take it easy," Paz said, one hand raised and turning around to Togusa. "I'm still setting up, you have time."

"Okay," Togusa breathed, dropping a large cup in the desk before grabbing his own gear.

Slightly shaking his head, Paz focussed back on the software interface he could both see and _know_ in his mind. The turian's body scan occupied the center of the interface, her nervous system highlighted in blue inside the grey holograph of her body. The interface components were green blocks and the criss-cross of of the NFC antenna inside the chair, and the activating nanotech they had infiltrated via the morning meal started to manifest as orange blips.

"Okay, mapping swarm is booting. Response so far is good."

"Did she notice anything?" Togusa asked.

"No, Mr. Togusa. She did not," Athena answered.

Paz nodded. "Nothing worse than a subject who goes into the session expecting a SRAM."

"We _do_ use Stimuli Response and Association Mapping, you know?" Garrus remarked from the back of the room. "Considering we're on a transhuman craft here, I'd think she's at least suspecting it."

Paz dipped his head to the side in acknowledgement: "Sure, but suspecting and knowing are two different sides of the coin. And SRAMTen 455 doesn't have an optical signature when infiltrated into meat. Thankfully, turians _love_ their meat."

Garrus gave an amused nod.

Paz turned back to his screen: "Alright, swarm is configured and moving into the brain. Getting the first activity highlights."

"Are we good to go?" Bau asked through the open door from the corridor.

"Give it… two minutes until we can start scanning and scrubbing at optimal resolution," Paz decided, flipping his visor up and turning his head towards the door. "First reactions are always going to be interesting; be a shame to lose that in too low resolution."

"Alright," the Spectre said, stepping back out into the corridor.

Paz switched his interface, exchanging the diagnostics screen with the actual scrubbing interface. The timeline was dominating the lower part. The content timeline was located above the space where the audio cue transcription would be, words matched to the associated responses. The rest of the screen was dominated by the central viewer window, the Psychographs and brain activity overview screens to the left, and tool feedback spaces to the right.

Slowly, all of the windows save the central viewer filled with full-color data as the nanoswarm inside Furina Enninus booted up.

Paz nodded. "Spectre Bau, you can go in. Let's see what we can get."

"Operators are ready?" the Spectre asked.

"Paz, ready."

"Togusa, ready."

"Spectre Bau and Spectre Operator T'Lairo are going in to question the subject."

Paz settled his hands comfortably on the interface pads mounted to the chairs armrests, and took a deep breath. Then he throttled up the direct neuronal data connection.

The intercepted alien thoughts broke like water against his own mind, conceptually folded as best as the interface software could manage. Even so, the mind stream was in entirely alien languages, and some of the concepts sent the human parts of Paz's mind into pretzels of impossible logical hoops. With a deep breath, he pushed them away, and called upon the already responding skillsets instead, force-grown neuronal networks in his brain reacting to the new data and picking it apart.

He felt the initial jolt of fear, and smiled. "Bingo."

Behind Paz and Togusa's position, Garrus, Voto'Leelas, Batou and the Major watched the alternate feed projected on the massive holographic screen that simulated a one-way mirror into the adjacent interrogation room. Ghostly images appeared on the central feed, twitching and rippling as they passed into each other. Sometimes the output was like a strange dream viewed through water, sometimes it was rife with edge artefacts and anomalies akin to an bad graphics render.

At the top of the screen the audio transcript ran by, word by word. "Special Tactics and Reconnaissance" caused a small firestorm to break loose inside the brain renders to the left, false color activity dancing through the dense neural networks.

"Whoa," Batou muttered.

New windows spliced themselves off, displacing the one big render, and specific image sequences began playing. Muddy memories of news reports, some form of meeting, long rows of text with only a few words in supernatural sharp focus, text passages jumping in and out of focus.

As quickly as it began, it ended and new images displaced the previous ones. Bau was reading down the list of accusations while Paz and Togusa hung almost passively inside their chairs, hands twitching.

Even with accelerated perception, the SRAM was a gauntlet. The LAIs were pre-filtering as much as they could, but Paz had to rely on split-second identification, then handing off the juicy bits to Togusa for more detailed analysis to stay on top of the onrush of new data. "Well, she's definitely guilty of everything we just read her", his mouth spoke while he was already busy analyzing elsewhere.

[Interrogators, start on list one,], he transmitted, clearing his queue.

[Copy,] Bau replied.

"Why were you on Bekenstein?"

The brain scans flared a bit, but there was no strong hit.

"Why were you at Adriens' party?"

[That got more out of her,] Togusa remarked.

Paz grimaced in response; his flare of anger and betrayal at the mention of Adriens' name was palatable. [Scrub that.] He forked off the association maps to Togusa, and carried on with filtering the incoming data.

"What is your relation to Adriens?"

"Who are your companions?"

"How did you arrive?"

"How did you travel on Bekenstein?"

"Did you use a private shuttle or an aircar?"

"Were you armed? Did you have personal barriers?"

Every question produced responses, and new images. The turian herself stayed stoically silent.

[How is it looking?] Bau came back, after asking another question: "When did you arrive? 3 P.M.? 4 P.M.?"

[We're getting there. But I need a baseline. Togusa?]

[Bekenstein Baseline is almost complete, responses is strong, chaff is minimal. But we need the full list before I can say anything.]

[Understood.]

"What is your relationship with the other turians?" Bau spoke.

"Are they compatriots of yours?" Aetheis asked.

The brain scans spiked immediately as new images appeared. "Well, the answer's obvious," Batou muttered as ghostly images of now-familiar faces flickered by. Clouds of translated text, themselves translations of neuronal activity flickers, surrounded the faces of the other turian separatists.

"Spinning off a relationship net," Togusa said. A new widget opened on the holographic wall screen, and filled slowly with a multicolored relationship map. As Garrus leaned forward in confusion, a color legend appeared next to the graphics.

"Romantic relationship?" Garrus asked. "That's interesting."

Togusa didn't comment.

Batou laid his hands on the back of Togusa's chair and looked closer at the holograph. For a moment, he focused beyond into the interrogation room, and the turian who sat there stoically. Then his Sleepless eyes focused back on the relationship web. "That's a hook, right there. We can agitate her with that, get some mental hocks in." Thoughtfully, he reached out with a hand, and created an entoptic render of the data.

[Mark anything else related to their relationship,] he advised his Muse as he began writing down notes with an AR-rendered pen next to the graphic.

"How about Vellus Quantius Laetus?" Bau asked.

The biometrics jumped through the roof, and the psychographs spiked in turn - stress especially. Garrus noted the changes on the relationship chart. "Definitely involved, those two," the turian remarked. "Has to make for an interesting story, the leader of a cell and his second in command bedding each other," he said with an amused twitch of his mandibles.

"Or Altari Teliminus? Aetheis asked. There was less of a spike.

"Do you know Vibilia Batis?" The reaction was almost non-existent.

"Wait, that guy isn't on our list, is he?" Voto'Leelas asked while running a search.

"Deception," Kusanagi commented. "We don't want to play our cards too early or too clearly. Once we go into the finer details, she'll figure out we're running a SRAM session."

"Oh, right."

"Does the name Luxi Trajerea tell you something?" The spikes and images were back, coming through a bit stronger.

"Former companion," Garrus guessed off the snapshots of decoded memory recalls. "Fought together." A moment later, the analysis spit out similar conclusions.

"That's another hook," Batou said. "Hey - Vakarian, get on that."

"Right." The turian made a hand gesture to pull himself a copy from the wall screen, and grabbed a physical dataslate to work.

Fifteen minutes later, Bau and Aetheis stopped the first session, and both Togusa and Paz removed the visors of their interface headsets, though not the cooling cabs or cables.

"Can I get some of your juice?" Paz asked, eyeing the massive cup Togusa was slurping from through a straw.

"Yeah, sure." Togusa held his omnitool over the opening for a moment, letting a UV laser flicker over it to sterilize, then handed the cup to Paz.

"Much appreciated." Paz nodded, and scratched himself behind one ear. Sweat glistened around his mouth.

"Well guys, I'm heading back to Ops," Voto'Leelas said before the actual dialogue could start. "Thanks for letting me hang around."

" _Nessun problema, amico_ ", Paz said and turned back to his screen, removing the cooling cap and rest of the heatset with a relieved sigh. His hair was ruffled from there the smart fibre "fur" of thermal superconductors had infiltrated to make contact with his scalp. Everything landed on the table with a clang of heavy plastics and electronic components, and the burrowed cup was placed in the center of the table.

Bau and Aetheis came in ass Voto'Leelas stepped out the door. Seeing the salarian eyeing him, Paz went straight to business.

"Well, the first session went pretty well." Grabbing an entoptic control, the interrogation specialist scrolled back to the beginning, and enlarged a few of the outputs specifically.

"So, to start - her first responses when you confronted her. Well, she's guilty on all of them. Ta-da!" Paz exclaimedd sarcastically. "They're part of the _Pazelis_ Fighters." Tri-symmetric graphics flashed by on the screen, memories of hideouts, flags and shoulder pauldrons marked with face paint-like lashes of white, aquamarine blue and red. Paz halted one of the memory moments, and allowed an assisting LAI to open up windows with clean comparisons of the iconographic as well as basic data on the group around it.

"Relatively big group on the trailward core sectors", Garrus took over. "Ran a quick refresh. Active since 1896 A.C.E., stamped out thrice but never rooted for good. We burn the people and the gear, and a generation later someone else takes over the Manifesto, builts them back up. Last time they got hit in 2641 A.C.E. they were pretty much dismantled _again._ Since then, not a lot. Hits here and there, but they've been regrouping by all accounts."

"Sounds like a match made in heaven."

"Yeah. Two independence-seeking terrorist groups who really want to get back at the big governments, but don't have the resources. So they start cooperating and pool resources."

"Turians provide the gear, transhumans provide the bodies and software?" Aetheis speculated.

"Maybe," Togusa replied thoughtfully. "Something here still stinks though. There's just not enough brainpower for everything." He tapped around in the desk in front of him, moved the interrogation interface into the background of the big holographic screen, and opened a new window in front. A moment later, the portraits of the arestees from the Cedatis Station operation popped up.

"These guys are pretty good by all indications. At least, those we could ID or interrogate. But they only developed the deployment shell, not the payload. And where did they get the neuroscience to do this? We gotta ask her that, too."

Bau nodded. "We have that on the advanced list. Paz, if you would continue?"

Paz nodded, and turned the entoptic controls forward. "Falsified IDs, not a lot. There's some rough data", jumbled, out-of-focus images and a dense cloud of words appeared, "phantom memories from an external cover personna that was used for some time, but it's not clear. We'd need neuro-forensics to really get something out of that. In my opinion, not worth the effort at this time. Let's dig later."

With a nod, Bau motioned to move on.

"Now, some more interesting tidbits. When we talked about NOVUM SPIRITUS, she knew immediately we were talking about it _specifically_. There wasn't even any doubt in her mind."

"So this is their only weapon?"

"Of the formats we talked about? Yes. There's sufficient association noise in the background to guarantee NOVUM SPIRITUS is not their only infoweapon, but it's their only WMM."

Everyone in the room sighed in relief.

"Also, they call it _Saihidisten._ " Paz worked his mound around the turian word.

" _Sayhidysten,_ " Garrus corrected. "Which is… an old Deutan of Cunning. Served at the court of the Titan _Ahiesten_ , a warlord of the Shihystrel plains."

"Associated with trickery, manipulation, and mind games. Sabotaged dozens of battles in the favor of his Titan," Togusa completed. Garrus nodded, mouth opened. After a moment, he recovered.

"Says something about what they want to do with this thing, huh?" The turian looked around. "I think I need a chair-"

On cue, a door on the side of the room opened and ejected an unfurling chair of memory polymer. Without a comment, the turian pulled the robotic piece of furniture over and dropped on it.

"This would be what we call a Johannson's Horse," Kusanagi said. "Named after Dietrich Johannson. Old hacktivist, back in the 2110s. He programmed a Daemon that was designed to engineer an entire political downfall, in this case that of several colonial admins."

"Why?" Garrus askeed.

Batou shrugged. "You can google it, not hard to find. Point is, this _Sayhidysten_ , they likely want to use it in a similar, far more sophisticated manner. They go hack politicians, leaders with this. Reprogram them, insert sleeper daemons, or just crash them. Maybe lethally. Until they are in a position where they have to tip a few dominos and the entire region comes crashing down in flames."

"The scenario you are describing, Batou, that happen before?" Bau asked.

"That," Paz said grimly, "is how the Outer Fringe War started. By ghosthacking officials and people of power, the Outer Fringe Coalition started one of the bloodiest wars in our history, in '86. That was the biggest Johannson's Horse to date."

"Are you saying…" The turian nervously worked on his mandibles with both hands. "Spirits."

Batou nodded sourly. "That, my friend, is why we are so fucking worried about NOVUM SPIRITUS. 'Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world,' Archimedes said 2500 years ago. Well, if we read the name she has for this right, this is the next big lever. And I'm sorry to say, but your guys don't have the expertise to cockblock this one. Not yet."

"Then we have to get them before that happens." The turian stood back up, and started wandering restlessly. Togusa started lifting himself out of his chair, but Bau gave him a subtle sign with his hand.

"They will have to assemble the weapon. Bring shell and payload together, compile it. Probably test it too, if there wasn't any payload on Cedatis station?"

"We never found one," Kusanagi said unhappily. "Maybe there was something on the slagged servers, but there's no other evidence for that."

"Anybody else finding that strange?" Aetheis asked. The room turned to her. "This R&D program, it's incredibly separated. And wouldn't you want to run the development outside of transhuman space? That's the one place where ASIs are watching for suspicious data chatter."

"It's also the one and only place where you can get your hands on precursor codelines and a lot of computing tech easily. And the people with the minds to develop NOVUM SPIRITUS", Togusa said. "And as for data exchanges - they likely used Q-hobos. Blackbox, hard data shipping with captains good enough or sympathetic enough to not ask questions. It's a small piece of casing and one more fibre-optic line on a cargo crafts backbone, a casual inspection doesn't see things like that."

The asari nodded, massaging her forehead for a moment before Bau spoke up. "As I was saying, they'll have to assemble it and test it. The question is: where?" He turned to Paz, who in turn looked to Togusa. "You scrubbed the details, find anything?"

Togusa thought about the question before turning around in his chair and looking at his screen while he manipulated it via his DNI. "Yeah, but it was tertiary association. Bad quality, not a strong recall, and no specific location. All I can definitely say it's trail- and coreward. Not that far from the border."

"So we can add that to the next barrage of questions," Bau stated. "What else?"

"She's in love with her boss," Batou said. "And has a relation with one of the shooters, former brothers-in-arms. Both of those are emotional hooks. We play it right and break her cool, it might get us more info."

Bau looked at Paz, who nodded. "Not a bad idea, but we'll have to play it right. Emotional reactions are a double-edged sword. SRAM _can_ get better results if the subject is emotionally distressed and asked the right questions, but we get her too worked up about her boyfriend and she's going to be an emotional mess. Endocrines go to hell and from there it's descending into noise land. After a point, even our AIs won't be able to filter and translate what she thinks about, and then..." he trailed off, raising his arms.

"So, if we're doing it, we'll have to play a fastball. Ask her a question, see for reactions and immediately and specifically double down on on those pointers we see."

"A shouting match, with other words," Aetheis said. "Me and Bau will have to be 'bad cop, worse cop', as you transhumans say".

Paz nodded. "That's the only way to really use emotions."

Bau didn't leave them time to ponder the problem. "Get set for a second session. We're going back in."

* * *

 **Technology/Neurotech**

 **Stimuli Response and Association Mapping**

Stimuli Response and Association Mapping, short SRAM, is an advanced neuro-interrogation technique that was developed as off-shots of brain research and the technology required to map brains to the fidelity required for full brain emulation. Starting as an advanced lie detector, the current cutting edge of SRAM can, with enough processing power, see what a person is thinking about in real time.

SRAMing exploits the fact that, when sophonts are provided with simuli, their brain auto-analyses and associates these stimuli with its own memories. In the case of interrogations, these are verbal questions, images, video and other sounds. By reading, decoding and translating the neuronal reactions to the stimuli, SRAM reconstructs through massive amounts of real-time processing power and LAI pre-filtering what the subject knows about the stimuli.

What makes SRAM so powerful is that it cannot be easily resisted. It turns the very nature of brains against them. Furthermore, modern SRAM relies on Nanoimaging swarms and is essentially non-invasive; it involves no implants or large headgears, and as no ego fork is created and interrogated or decompiled, it is seen as far more humane.

The use of SRAM technology is restricted under Citadel Alliance and Systems Alliance law alike. Both only allow the use of SRAM either at the subjects prior consent, in order to prove his innocence, or in a restricted selection of capital cases. In the later cases, a warrant has to be procured with effective judgement authorities, be it a court or also, in transhuman cases, that of TITAN/ANUBIS.


	48. Borders Pt 1

— "If we choose to stay divided by borders, nationalities, civilizations and our origins as a people, the end result will only be strive, conflict and war.

"Our civilizations were forged on the foundations of mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation. And it is with that understanding that I wish to extend the olive branch of peace to the Turian Hierarchy."

— "And it is with this understanding, that we accept."

Systems Alliance Prime Minister _Alexi Xulien_ and Primarch _Alandris Farisen_

 **— "The Olive Branch Speech"  
Official Ratification of the Keiling-Victus Accords at Xin Shanxi — September 16th 2209 A.D.**

* * *

2.5 AU away from New Valencia's, 1 light minute over the G1V stars ecliptic, Depot DSI/NV-12 was a massive collection of trusswork and endless collection of spherical tanks, wrapped in thick triangular patterned whipple shielding. The entire facility looked vaguely like a strange technological seed from far away: A star-facing sun shield was the base, the thick disk of the propellant depot was the seed core, sprouting docking arms like hair protrusions, while the aft heat radiators were some aerodynamic implement, with the cylinder of the fission power supply at the very end.

SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ was docked against one of the depot's arms, its own and the depot's capture arm holding onto each other like strange insects, while the thick connector of the fuel transfer system plugged into the main structure about 2/3rds of the way along the spacecrafts hull.

From the forward Observation and Lounge Deck, the flank of the propellant depot looked like a towering wall in space to Garrus. Sunlight didn't stray here, blocked by the shadow shield that allowed the facility to keep itself supercooled and the propellant compressed into a state normally only found in gas giant cores, so the only light were the washing cones of massive floodlights.

It made the scene look even more clinical than space always seemed to be, behind the filters that kept yourself from going blind after one incidental glance into the unfiltered brightness of a star.

The turian stood there passively, deep in thought. Things were moving fast. Back into interrogation, methodically peeling away what she knew, hour-long sprints interrupted by quick breaks and discussions, gulping down the food that was brought in by helpful robots. A late mid-day break, cut short by going back into interrogation, this time in the "hot seat" in the cell.

He'd expected the separatists to spit at him, and she had tried. The kinetic barrier had caught the saliva, and the cell had responded with an automated electric shock and a nanotech clean sweep.

After that, the synthetic guard… units… had stayed inside the room, a reminder that this would not happen again.

Then, in the later afternoon, the transhuman Flight Commander had announced that they had arrived in New Valencia, a transhuman star system in the Citadel corridor, at the rim of turian space. Here, a primary Relay bridged the two nation's space, heading into the depths of the turian coreward colonies.

The reason for the existence of this propellant depot station, Garrus was almost certain. He was old enough to remember the videos and large online articles, the war games he had played with his friends. The Sacrifices of Pilot Arden, the adventures of Captain Precitis and his team to combat the transhuman menace."New Valencia" was a familiar name, more familiar than "Bekenstein" in any case. And nobody built off-ecliptic stations for shit and giggles.

The 1-MC opened with a direct, attention-seeking gong: "Attention all crew, this is the Flight Commander: SSV _Raven of Midnight_ has ceased maneuvering and is on stationkeeping operations. We are commencing personnel transfer operations. Starboard 'Lock 02, stand-by for contact."

Garrus looked up at the announcement. Thinking, he turned around, watching for the reactions of the other people on the deck. The transhumans hadn't even looked up at the announcement, and were returning to whatever they were doing. Many of them just sat in the chairs and couches in relaxed posture, eyes closed, minds… somewhere. Some part of him wanted to compare them to drug addicts.

Considering how infamously net-dependant all transhumans were, that was probably closer to the truth than they'd wanted to admit.

The turian made his decision, and headed aft, towards the left-side corridor.

He'd bid his goodbye to some good soldiers the physical way.

 **[ Chapter 11 - Borders ]**

Starboard Airlock 02 was completely familiar to Naomi. It was a standard module spit out by hundreds of industrial complexes, fitted out according to one of maybe 6 packages, and then mounted into spacecraft.

The light came from wide-field OLED panels mounted into the polymer ceiling strewn with hatches and grips, the furniture was all soft-impact polymer foam so you couldn't hurt yourself in zero-G, and there were blue, yellow and green grips everywhere; the yellow at the ceiling, the blue at the bottom, the blue inbetween.

The racks were part general-purpose locker, but mostly quick-mount rigs for "Blue suits": heat management, debris armor and radiation shielding for space activities together with the associated backpacks and helmets. The users already-worn biosuit served as the core piece of the mechanical counterpressure suit. The other side of the room held an empty rack space where Espatiers could ready up their vacuum assault suits.

The Operator tugged at the sling of her duffle bag, then looked down at Clarke-903. Her brother had dropped down on a bench, and was slowly working his hands around two polymer balls, massaging them with his hands methodically, one finger after the other. Sometimes he'd stop, drop one and scratch himself somewhere, and she noticed he sometimes touched his face too.

She took a breath and channeled her commanding officer voice: "You okay, Clarke?"

He tensed and reacted immediately: "Yes Sir. I'll deal."

Opposite of her, Salem subtly shook his head. [We should have egocast and resleeved elsewhere], he comm'ed her a moment later, making physical eye contact also.

[No time and connection for that, and you know it. We're redeploying.]

"Where to anyway?" Salem asked out out, and she huffed, shooting him an angry glare.

"Where to? What's that s'posed to mean?", Clarke asked.

Naomi shot Salem another angry glance, then turned around: "SSV _Raven of Midnight_ is heading out on Op with MT-Charlie-21. X-Ray is folding in for support."

She turned to Clarke: "And you're staying behind the scope. It's a data farm raid. Nice and easy."

His new Shell breathed out a sigh of relief, and her brother dropped against the locker. "...Good", he finally said, and resumed his hand motions.

"Bit too involved last time?"

"...Yes Sir", he admitted.

She nodded, understandingly. They all signed up for something different from the military service.

They all turned around as the access door began unlocking with a clunking noise. The EVA Prep Room was officially "Red Zone", outside of the main pressure vessel and directly underneath the primary armor belt, and kept under Decompression watch on principle.

Naomi was surprised to see Garrus Vakarian enter the room from the corridor. She shifted to see if there was anyone else, and kicked in her tactical overlay render to check for any more arrivals - but there weren't any. _Huh._

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"I just wanted to say goodbye", Vakarian said. "In person, not over… social media or some intranet or whatever. If I even found you."

Almost as one, the entire team produced entoptic data cubes out of thin air and threw them at Garrus, who took a step back as the entities shot towards him. A moment later, a set of contacts dropped down in a list on the edge of his ARO. "Now you do", Salem remarked, and pushed himself off from his leaning position. "And thanks for saying goodbye."

"Yeah, well…", Garrus started. Naomi pre-empted him. "This might look a little heartless, but we're used to it. Alpha-Oh-1 are family, almost. But well, Section 9 rolls fast."

"And you guys get shifted everywhere as reinforcements when required", Garrus completed her elaboration. Naomi nodded.

The turian leaned around her and looked at Clarke. She caught the slight shimmer of his iris, an indicator the turian was using his ARO. Then Garrus spoke: "Is Clarke going to be okay?"

The man in question looked up, and nodded. "It's not my first time", he said.

"Yeah sure, but… you died. Violently. And from what I hear the shock never goes away."

Clarke nodded silently. "But… better alive then permed. Permadeath", he clarified.

Garrus gave him an incredulous look: "A video game term?"

A shrug: "It works, right?"

"Yeah, but is treating death like a game a good way to handle this psychologically? That can't be good for your health. Not in the long run."

The Bioroids didn't comment, looking at each other from the corners of their eyes. Then Naomi sighed, and dropped her head. Garrus looked at the transhuman's tongue running over the red edges of her mouth in some alien gesture, then she looked up, and shifted, hesitantly unwrapping her arms from her chest.

"Okay…", Naomi breathed. "No. It's not healthy. We _homo sapiens silico…_ what we are, being interlects born on computers and sleeved into our bodies after three decades of education and training… we still have everything _homo sapiens sapiens_ had; still has. The will to live is strong. It's a fundamental… instinct, a variable you cannot delete. And from that springs self-preservation. So, when you die… it burns you out. Inside your mind, _something…_ it breaks."

"We call it the Phoenix Point", Salem said. "Reason a lot of military vets discharged early after the Verge War. Psychosurg' can fix a lot, but burned out is burned out. Even if you elect to have it fixed, the knowledge of it… the fear of this again unknown, it wrecks them again. That you have to give to all them Tin cans. Stupid as fuck they are… but they're also too stupid to care. Too stupid to break."

"And you served during the Verge War", Garrus finally said. "How many times?"

"6 times. From Stack", Salem volunteered.

"9 times", Naomi said.

"...11, counting this one", Clarke said with a croaking voice, and his hands started shaking for a very small moment.

"Spirits. I'm sorry."

"It is still what we signed up for. What we know. Combat… it's always a gamble. Your skill against the opponents, your Shells and weapons and shields against the enemies, and sometimes you have a good deck and sometimes odds are stacked against you. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose… sometimes you die."

"But you change something" Naomi said with fire in her eyes. "You make somebody safer, you put another asshole out of commission and into the jaws of the justice system, you stop identity theft and free a hundred people with HostageWare on their systems. Maybe you stop a new cold war from breaking out. And that is worth it."

The PA cut in: "Transfer shuttle from SSV _Raven of Midnight_ , arriving at Lock Starboard 2. Stand-by for dock 'n lock." Through the wall of the room, they heard hydraulics whine faintly.

Garrus looked at the assembled transhumans. With a quick motion, the turian snapped to attention, drawing the eyes of them all: "Thank you for your service. It was a honor serving with you." His left fist slammed against the chestplate, on the right side where the heartd was.

The bioroids snapped up and saluted as one. "The honor was ours."

The sound of metal on metal resonated through the airlock. "Contact", an AIs androgynous voice announced, "Hard contact. Lock confirmed, capture complete. Stand-by to equalize pressure."

Clarke stood up from his bench, and walked towards the airlocks inner door, hand reaching for the panel of thick, physical buttons located next to the metal frame. "Tell you what, Vakarian", he said, "for a bird? You're a damn fine raptor. 753rd would have had you as a brother in arms." He hit the key.

A denying "be-be-beep!" was the response. Irritated, Clarke turned around, then looked vaguely upwards: "Mind explaining?"

"Personnel are transferring from docked shuttle. Stand-by."

"I thought we were receiving nobody else-"

The shipside access door unlocked and opened, making way for Ishikawa and Kusanagi, with Voto'Leelas in tow. Behind them came a group of General Service Androids, their many carry-all arms hanging easily to the ground.

"So, uh, who exactly is coming aboard?", Clarke asked.

"Additional specialists." Kusanagi's face was cryptic as she said it. Clarke looked at Ishikawa, who shrugged subtly. _I don't know what is going on either._

The airlock status panel switched to "cycling". For the barest moment, two blue arrows turned around each other; then it already switched onwards to decontamination.

Garrus opened his mouth, reconsidered, and closed it again after a look at Kusanagi's face. The transhuman looked utterly passive, but she radiated… something that suggested she was angry. She had also positioned herself at the back of the room, but in the center, directly in line with the airlock. An "XO Grinder", the turian military called it. The turians fringe retracted. Somebody of the new arrivals was going to face a chewing.

"Hey!" A happy simian was the first out of the opening airlock doors. "Clarke, long time no personal see! How 'ya doing man?" Clarke opened his mouth, but the uplift had moved on.

Naomi was high-fived quickly while the arrival already turned away. "Togusa! And hey, you two guys", fingers were pointed at Garrus and Voto'leelas, "nice to see you as well."

Then the Shell turned to Kusanagi. "Ma'am."

"Senior Chief Bosoun", she replied, and her tone was frosting. "Why was I not informed of this?"

"Snap decision, Ma'am", the Chipanzee replied. "I ego-casted by team over to New Kopenhagen for the initial review, but it's proving harder than I'd like… and in three hours, Eyes won't be an easily accessible option anymore."

"I can tweak vaccine coding, Chief Bosoun", she replied. "The _Nagato_ does not have the processing ressources-"

" _Yet_. I did load up multi-mission containers."

"Active thinking. You are also aware that loading them will take half an hour?"

"You're still taking on fuel for 3/4ths of an hour."

Kusanagi was silent just a beat longer.

"Get stowed, and get ready. In 36 hours, I want a ready-to-use vaccine. The enemy will not be waiting on us."

"Yes Ma'am." Bosoun turned to the side. "Captain Akio, permission to come aboard?"

For a moment, an ARvatar of the captain appeared in the room: "Granted, Chief Bosoun. Get your team and personal gear aboard. We'll start handling the MMCs."

Without another word, the ARvatar disappeared.

Bosoun sheepishly scratched his head with his new, dextrous hands. His mouth formed a silent "whoops."

Saying nothing, Kusanagi disappeared back into the corridor. The silence hunt thick like emergency foam in the room.

Voto'Leelas spoke up, awkwardly: "So, uh… hi?"

* * *

Bau arrived on the bridge of the _Nagato_ with the 1800 hours shift change. A subtle gong was the only indication that a shift change was in order, through the Spectre noticed the spike in communication activity on the local mesh as encrypted communication streams disseminated detailed orders.

Captain Akio stayed her post however, as around her people efficiently vacated and manned the workstations and let auto-motile cables slide into their neck ports. Most remarkable was the Helms Officer change-over; the two transhumans exchanged their station casually and without haste during FTL flight, and made a point of announcing loud and clearly that they were transferring the small glass-like wavers of authorization keys.

"Spectre Bau", Captain Akio greeted him as he stepped forward into the command area, "have a seat." She tilted a head to one of the multi-purpose command consoles.

"Time to Relay transition?", Bau asked as he watched the seat mold itself to accommodate a salarian body better.

"16 minutes, if RelCon doesn't fuck it up and the turians don't make an issue", the executive officer, one Vladimir Jerković, replied from his station. "We set up the preliminary for your flight and IFF switchover, but we need your Ghostbox for the final."

Bau nodded. "I'll connect and run the key as soon as that is required."

"Roger that. Flight Lieutenant, how is she running?"

"Pretty well all around. Slightly sluggish on the CM gradient, about 61 milliseconds more on the switchover. Starting deceleration for Relay Influx, stand-by retros."

There was a subtle shift of forces, as if the deck was tilting forward for a moment. Bau's sensitive, augmented ears noticed the shift as the Intertics dialed back the compensation for the aft acceleration, and then the shift angled aft.

On the massive wrap-around viewscreen, a mixture of actual holographic screens and entoptic overlays, the white-glowing welding arcs of the Nagato's retro-engine mounts climbed into view. As they grew forward and into the edges of the centerline mass effect field, they started to warp and shift, turning brighter and into a painful blue. Then, as they pierced the interface field, they abruptly seemed to expand in both directions, creating a burning white X with the center directly on the nose and the arms extending aft, past the direct field of view.

Rendered in full depth by the imaging system, the effect was unsettling to watch.

On the clean and crisp HUD, numbers started dropping. The multi-segmented speed indicator had a red downward arrow appear next to it, together with a rising number showing the actual deceleration.

"That's good retros, good throttle-up. Velocity is downscale of 500C and dropping nominal down the profile. Last maneuver indicator is in T-Minus 35 seconds, IPTP-1261 final at T-Minus 2:36."

"Stand-by for Metric, Mode 3 transition in 3. 2. 1. We're in Mode 3, below 460 Cee. Metric is stable."

"Killing Retros. Stand-by turn execute maneuver." The helmsman turned a single physical switch on his console, and a soft beeping started. "In 3. 2. 1."

The CIC pod rendered the thruster activity audio-visual. The mains were a deep bass base, the RCS thrusters various brighter noises. They sounded like escaping gas instead of the hammers they actually were, far away out on the hull.

The spacecraft swung around, seemingly banking, and the distant forward light of compressed light sources, surrounded by the blue glow of shifted cosmic background radiation, wandered off-center, before drifting back on target, overlaid by the green circle and dot of the flight direction indicator.

"Re-engaging mains aft… and killing maneuver thrust. Indicated on alignment. Decelerating for influx, below 450 Cee." The X of the retro-engines grew again for'ard.

"That's acquisition on IPTP-1261 Approach Beacon signal, three lights green."

"Check, correcting approach vector. Stand-by sideburners." The transhuman reached out, and flipped open a red safety cover, flipping the switch underneath. "Correcting now." Another turn of the key.

"Stand-by for Metric, Mode 2. In 3. 2. 1." A slight shudder traveled through the spaceframe, a resonance that send everything vibrating ever so slightly. The voice of the engineer wavered ever to slightly with uncertainty. "...Good transition to Mode 2, below 300 Cee."

"She's misbehaving again," Jerković said nonchalante.

"Starboard Upper Alpha-14 emitter was the issue. Fluctuation on the Yetaji manifold beta transition, like the last three times."

Akio spoke up, voice tight with annoyance and a twinge of fear: "Athena, log it with engineering. The next failure, or downtime, we're pulling and replacing that set." The reply was inaudible.

"On approach. Beacon is locked, strong signal, alignment for Slot 14 is confirmed. Stand-by for influx in T-Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4..."

One the HUD, the numbers plummeted. 100 Cee. 50 cee. 25. 15. 10. 5. 2. 1.1

0.999

The _Fujibayashi Nagato_ appeared in a flash of blue and a distortion of space, the lances of her exhaust unfolding forward like strange angel wings.

Ahead, "above" them, hovered the pink-white-grey shape of a dwarf planet, 1400 kilometers of colored ice full of organic compounds and meteroidal silicates. It was partially dunked in shadows, and a few concentrated sources of light were visible on the dark side.

Even from there, light minutes out and pushing down hard from relativistic flight, the blinking blue star at the dwarf planets zenith was visible.

Relay 2342-Alpha was surrounded by a halo of traffic, at this distance only visible through their slipbeam-relayed IFF squarks or the minutes-ago sparkle of their drives, pushing them clear of the Relay or guiding them in for transition.

"Flight Sierra-Alpha-Mike-Charlie-November-Yankee-Delta-Oh-7621, New Valencia Relay 2342 LCC. We have you arriving on ENV-IPTP-1261 on 18:09:Oh-234, mirrored and verified. Continue with flight plan, your Relay slot is cleared on requested time, on both RTCs."

"Roger that, November Victor Romeo LCC. Flight Sierra-Alpha-Mike-Charlie-November-Yankee-Delta-Oh-7621 is declaring new Flight under Section 18, Treaty of Serminius. Redesignate Flight is Spectre-616."

There was silence on the comm for a moment, then a new voice came back: "Uh, copy that Sierra-Alpha-Mike-Charlie-November-Yankee-Delta-Oh-7621 , you are declaring yourself new Flight Spectre-616. Requesting your Ghostbox for Authentication handshake and IFF key."

Captain Akio turned around in her chair. "Spectre Bau?"

"Linking in now." He activated his omnitool, and placed it on one of the hand control screens of his acceleration chair. In his ARO, the link interface appeared, and he began the process of unlocking the Ghostbox.

Getting Spectres unique, unforgeable IDs had been a continuous security nightmare since the beginning of their expanded duties and rights under the Treaty of Serminius. The end result had been one of the most invasive, but also secure authentication methods ever developed - the Spectre Quantum Authorization Implant, "Ghostbox" in transhuman slang.

The quantical computer program contained within, a borderline LAI, had learned Bau inside and out. It required feeds from dozens of neural taps, continuously, to verify the nervous system and the Ego on it wasn't messed with in overriding ways. And it also ran, in lockstep with its own code, the cryptographic key that was his Spectre authorization.

Activating the key still took a very long, complex password chain, to be entered via DNI, and in Bau's case a voucher from his own Muse. After that, the system generated the key, and transmitted it out, bounced the long key through the air gapped authentication and authorization network of the _Nagato_ , was handed over to a high-security communication system, and left on an encoded beam of UV laser light sheathed in a metric of transient space-time, for one of the SysCon Com Buoy satellites hovering in local space.

"Receiving your Key stream, Sierra-Alpha-Mike. Stand-by for authenticate, we are handshaking with ISCD and ISCOD. Also, we are updating your flight plan, confirm please?"

XO Jerković looked at something. "...Looks like a priority reroute, clearing us from the other traffic. Flight Ops, take that and execute. LCC, we confirm and are complying."

"Check on the new plan, Sierra-Alpha-Mike, and your ID is confirmed. Sending new IFF Squawk, set for distribution on Channels Charlie-1, Charlie-2 and Mike-9. You are cleared for Priority S1 Flight Operations at your discretion and call. New Flight designate as of this time, Spectre-616. Do you wish to maintain your current RTS?"

Bau spoke up: "Yes."

"LCC, Spectre-616 will execute flight plan as filed."

"Understood, 616. You are go for transfer in T-Minus 9 minutes on RTS 872. LCC, clear on audio."

"That went better than expected", somebody remarked from the Ops Consoles aft of the command section. Akio nodded. "Gotta give it to LCC, they are always professional. And Procedure is Procedure to them. Now, if the local SecCom gets ideas, we're going to be in trouble, but I doubt that. We'll be off his table in a few moments."

"Then we only have to pass turian TransSec as a Systems Alliance SpecOp cruiser registered with an internal security agency and a Spectre ID code in its IFF…", somebody else muttered sceptical.

"At easy, Pierce. We jump that Relay when the time comes", Akio replied.

"Yessir."

"Initiate Pre-Transition checklist. Sound Condition CV-2, and rig the compartments for Transition."

"Aye Sir."

"Engineering, secure all translight systems. And pay especial care that our troubled emitter can't start resonating. The last thing I want is a crash transition event."

"Aye Sir on the TFGs, got the maintenance crawlers on Alpha-14. Shutting down external mass effect gear and standing down main drive core to Sub-FTL levels."

The dwarf planet was circled by a group of satellites, round spheres of nickel-iron, covered in thick white plating and studded with surface extensions. From the Nagato, the round bowl on one of them was clearly visible. _Orbital forts_ , Bau thought. _A thousand Capital Cruise Missiles and enough heatsinks to power a laser that can slag a battleship._

Closer to the Relay, the mobile task force of the Systems Alliance Spacy held their vigil over the traffic proceedings, cruiser and frigates sedately moving on patrol orbits. Occasionally, the cruisers or heavy frigates launched or retrieved a gunboat on an inspection boarding flight, or swung around to burn onto a new vector.

The picture was serene, but it was hard to ignore the fortress installations - or the network of military satellites near the Relay, surrounded by red exclusion zone markers. This remained a border fortification, as good as it was feasible and willed to secure a relay against hostile transitions.

The _Nagato_ stayed well clear of the Relay's 1 light second-radius transition volume, where bubble after bubble of arriving spacecraft appeared with a streak of blue out of infinite, star-covered distance and a warping of light and space.

Then it swung about, facing the blunt end of the Relay nose-on, and killed its velocity until it was stationary. "On pre-transition parking slot", the flight officer announced.

"Pre-Transition checklist?", Akio asked.

"All compartments are secured for jump. FTL eezonics powered down and secured. Transition profile is pre-entered, ready for final calculations and transition, and I double-checked with the LCC: we are cleared on schedule."

"Alright." Akio nodded, and let her physical gaze wander through the CIC, ending at Bau: "1-MC, please."

It opened with a beep.

"Crew, now hear this, now hear this. We are leaving transhuman space in a few minutes, leaving the Systems Alliance behind.

"This will be a new experience for all of us. Few of us served with the craft who had the honors or leaving transhuman space on missions of peace and friendship, and into turian space especially - _but_ , soon we will join them.

"And just like these craft, and the crews that manned them, we will perform our duties exemplary, for the honor of the _Fujibayashi Nagato_ , for the honor of Section 9, and in duty to transhumanity _and_ in duty of our fellow sophonts. I expect, and trust, that you will all serve as shining examples of our people.

"Many of us came to Section 9 for a belief. The belief that we would render the galaxy a safer place through our actions. Today, this duty takes us beyond transhuman space, but not beyond the reach of our beliefs. And that is why we will all succeed, together."

The helms officer nodded at an unheard transmission, and turned around: "Clearance for transition?"

"Granted. Take us in."

"Understood." The transhuman reached out, and turned the authorization key. "Engaging transition maneuver. Accelerating."

The Nagato shot forward on high-power countermass and full throttle of its engines in fusion mode, a single white shape heading towards the distant blinking light of the Relay.

"Relay is in range, initiating Transmission sequence. Sending handshake… we are connected. Sending transit mass and destination."

"Distance to Relay is 250,000 and closing. Relay approach is acquired, guidance is locked."

"Relay confirms we are set, going hot. Getting acquisition pings."

"Copy that. At transition velocity, standing down and securing mains." The Helms Officer simply pressed down on a row of four of his collection of red safety caps, then pressed three buttons and turned a dial. „Propulsion is secure for transit. Passed Indicator Point 3, refining approach vector."

"Relay has us locked and on the line, Snap-point indicator is T-Minus 10… mark."

The blue star began pulsing a bit more rapidly, growing in visual intensity by the second as they shot towards the Relay. Seeing it with his own eyes, some part of Bau made him grip tightly to the acceleration couch arms.

"And hitting the Relay in 3…"

Suddenly it materialized visually, growing to the intensity of an artificial star, blotching our the stars on the left side of the viewscreen as sensor gains adjusted.

"2.."

The lighting bolt of dark energy shot out towards them, splitting and enveloping the cruiser. Ahead, starlight shifted and broke as space-time was manipulated, pinched and warped, to catapult them across 1000 light years.

"1."

Over the nose, pure darkness spread inside a halo of brilliant white, At its center, a muddy, distant star scape.

And the, in an impossible moment that look the blink of an eye, they moved _through_ the darkness.

The Nagato shot over a thousand lightyears of real space, a bubble of space-time pressed through a bulk of higher-dimensional space like a pebble from a slingshot, until the second Relay caught the corridor of engineered space-time, drew it in, and deposited its contents back into normal space.

6 AU from an orange-red sun, so very different from the G1 brilliance of New Valencia, the Nagato materialized 125,000 kilometers away from the Relay.

"Arriving Flight Spectre-616, Kisaleves Relay Transfer Control. We have you arriving on 18:17:Oh-680, mirrored and verified. Transition Point 124.32K-K, 60-mark-31 Relay-relative. Disengage from RAZ on vector 60-mark-31 Relay-relative, then vector on Transit 231 to Junction 422, and to Stand-by slot 087. Prepare to receive inspection party."

"Confirm all but the inspection party part", Akio said, then raised her voice: "Kisaleves RTC, Spectre-616 Flight Actual, Interrogative: Reason for inspection party? We have priority flight to Kasint."

A new voice answered them: "Spectre-616, your ID is suspicious; we are boarding and inspecting your vehicle to verify you are what you pretend you are. Comply or you will be engaged by Local Space Patrols, how copy?"

Captain Akio stood up from her chair and turned around to look at Bau. The salarian had closed his eyes and was taking a deep breath.

"Captain, if you would excuse me for a moment?" Bau pushed himself out of the acceleration chair. "I have a patrol's commander's ass to chew out."

* * *

 **Glossary**

 **K-K:** Short for "Kilo-Klick" or kilo-kilometers. 1 K-K is 1,000 kilometers.

 **LCC:** Local Space Control Center

 **RAZ:** Relay Arrival Zone, the volume of space where Relay transfers are, under nominal transfer tickets, 99% likely to emerge.

 **RTC:** Relay Transfer Control


	49. Borders Pt 2

The interior of the _Pantivis Eantosalva_ CCE-144 Assault Gunboat was clanking with the sounds of an entire platoon of the Special Space Combat Group preparing for deployment.

Second Claw Vasares Itendres Valenteus sat at one of the tactical consoles on the upper troop deck, under the TacOps and Piloting deck, and listened to the voice of Talon Commander Ventaris on the Tightbeam uplink.

"We cross-referenced the spaceframe with the database - the most likely match is a _Los Angeles-_ class cruiser. 620 meters primary length, 950,000 metric tons, crew volume 100,000 cubic meters. The Systems Alliance does not declassify a lot of data on them, but they are covert-ops Q-enabled frames. Internal layouts are not available."

"Understood Commander. How much support am I getting? A single platoon will not be enough, and I am not trusting my drones on independent deployment inside that vehicle."

"4th and 5th Company of the 24rd Aerospace are scrambling up from Talentes, ETA 15 minutes. Your objective is to get aboard and secure bridge and engineering - specifically the primary control cards for the drives and weapon systems. I do not want that vehicle able to move. After that, we are clearing the entire spaceframe, pres-ves to baffles. If the transhuman thinks monkeying around with IDs is funny, this will drive the message home that there are laws and lines not be broken and crossed. If they make problems, proceed as required. Understood?"

"Yes, Commander Ventaris."

"5 minutes out", the pilot called on the PA. "Flipping, stand-by for zero-zero decel and capture."

Inside the thin spaceframe, the thundering punch of the maneuvering thrusters reverberated throughout the entire hull. Somebody made the obligatory joke about "hammering it home", and strained laughter sounded. There was a fresh rustle as varia-G tactical rigs were checked, the omnipresent subtle whirring sound of heavy-duty exoskeletons and the cloth-like straining of artificial muscles, underpinned by the heavy clang of armored combat boots on the metal floor.

The tension in the air was palpable, swinging between fringe-contracting fear and mandible-tightening anger. Some looked down at gloved hands in a strange form of reconciliation, a _this is what we were augmented for_ moment. And behind that is the question _Will it be enough?_

Everyone had adapted. The Hierarchy began building better weapons, better armor… better soldiers. But the transhumans had adapted in turn, and they'd be fighting, if it came down to it, on a transhuman spacecraft. Against what would probably be hundreds of hostile enemy combatants, with the enemy party in control of air, temperature, paragrav and intertics. If it came to blows it would be bloody.

And that was ignoring the fact that shooting on a transhuman _military_ spacecraft would likely go down as well as an orbital drop on any turian garden world, and they'd all be finely dispersed plasma by way of a nuclear scuttling charge. Followed by at least a hot stand-off and political shootings. If it got to the worst… well, she wouldn't be around for that. A part of Valenteus was strangely glad for that fact.

"4 minutes out."

She ripped herself out of her thoughts, and hit the physical key that logged her out from the tactical station, then unlimbered herself from the upright acceleration chair and turned towards the railing and ladder overlooking the troop bay. At the sound of her feet on the deck, heads and helmets turned up to her, visors open.

"Alright, listen up! This is _not_ a hot entry scenario! Weapons are down _and_ red!", she shouted over the roar of the fusion drive "below". "Our job is to verify the crew and secure the drive keys in the Con Pod and Engineering deck. Two teams will do that, First Squad with me to the Con, Second with Takent to Engineering. Stay together and stay alert, space yourself out, don't let yourself get surprised! The "crew" of these vehicles isn't large, but there will be robots everywhere."

"2 minutes." On the overhead tactical screens, optical telescope images appeared, showing the transhuman spacecraft. It looked strangely turian with its four wings and white primary color, but was covered in blue stripes and black shapes. Navigation lights blinked serenely in blue-white, green and red.

The com squawked, a microwave short-range com with the SSV… _Fujibayashi Nagato._ The term was _almost_ pronounceable.

"Jumper 23112, Spectre-616 Approach, we are standing by to receive you at Ventral Dock 01. Guidance beacon is live at this time, we are opening the space doors. Please confirm."

"Spectre-616, Jumper 23112, we confirm your beacon and are proceeding on Combined. Time to capture Our indicator 1 minute 40."

Valenteus nodded to nobody in particular and turned around, grabbing the ladder and sliding down to the troop deck. The men made space for her, and she looked them all in the eye. "Get set for action, SCC! What are we?"

 **"Soldiers of the Hierarchy!"**

"What are we?!" She unlocked her Phaeston, and let it decompact in her right hand.

 **"Killers, born to take!"**

"What are we?!" Gave her tactical rig one last experimental tug and shake.

 **"Disciplined to the death!"**

" _What_ do we do?", she thundered.

 **"We serve the Hierarchy!"** it answered from a dozen throats.

" _What_ do we do?" She made eye contact with First Talon Alentis, in 2nd Squad.

 **"We guard! We protect! We kill!"**

" _What_ do we do?"

 **"We serve till we can no more!"**

"And _how_ do we do it?"

 **"By fighting together!"**

" _Pre cue csasea!_ " She slammed her fist into her chest.

 **" _Pre cue csasea!_ " **Every turian followed.

" _Pre cue csasea!_ "

 **" _Pre cue csasea!_ "**

"Warfaces on! Squads, in position! Masks! Down!"

With a single, smooth gesture, every turian reached up at once, and slammed their faceplates shut.

They were ready for war. Ready for whatever would be on the other side of that hatch. They would execute their missions, circle-perfect, as soldiers of the Hierarchy. And they would succeed.

She ignored the questions gnawing at the back of her mind.

"Stand-by for capture… contact." The pilot was crisp-cool, as always. On the external hull, arms hit metal.

"Pulling us in… and extending docking tube."

She nodded, and held her right hand up, hand balled into a fist.

"That's hard contact. Equalizing."

Extending a single finger, Valenteus pointed forward: "Door!"

Alinies stepped forward, and hit the door switch. With a clank, the armored pressure door unlocked, pulled forward, and slid aside into the wall.

"At pressure, seals confirmed. Clear to proceed. Good luck."

"And go, go, go!" She waved forward twice.

The first fireteam stalked in, economic in their movements, weapons easily held but at the ready. After a moment, she followed in behind, unfastening her gun from the chest SmartPack and bringing it up in her right hand again.

The pressure corridor was barely two meters long, barebones and functional, and at the end there was a second hatch, not too dissimilar to their own airlock. It was a solid, armored square with a single heavily armored viewing port in the center, with a single large mechanical handle sunk into the doors surface next to a retracted wheel. Large QR code script was plastered across much of the surface, framed in the universal yellow-orange of "caution", and she knew what it said even with the translator in autistic mode: Instructions of how to open the airlock hatch manually, if required.

For a second, the hatch remained closed - _then_ it unsealed, and withdrew inwards and sidewards on its hinges.

She couldn't directly see into the airlock proper, but first Fireteam stopping cold meant something was inside. She braced on instinct, awaiting the potential blow-back of a shaped charge detonation.

"Soldier, where is your commanding officer?", a salarian voice barked.

The SCC soldiers were silent, assessing. Was this a ruse, to identify the head of the command chain and decapitate the main chain, forcing the remaining soldiers to shift and work with less brain power?

"Identify yourself", the point man responded after a tense moment.

The salarian voice turned acidic and assumed a complete commanding officer inflection - in flawless Kesheon. "Senior Operative Jondum Bau, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance Corp. Where is your commanding officer?"

"That would be me", Valenteus finally said. "Second Claw Vasares Itendres Valenteus, and I need your ID. Telentis."

Trooper Telentis stepped forward and raised his Omnitool. The salarian raised his. Valenteus triggered her circuit: "Potential contact with salarian Shell claiming to be Spectre Jondum Bau, stand-by for ID."

"Standing by to verify", the distant voice of a controller in a CIC confirmed.

"SCV Vasares, why are you inspecting my spacecraft?"

"We cannot verify that you are who you are."

"...Then you have a very bad Cybersecurity Command, SCV", Jondum Bau remarked as both omnitools beeped. "And I very much hope they kicked their concerns over a compromised Siquasi up the chain so the actual experts on QNC verification can check on this."

"Right now we are concerned with this vehicle", Valenteus replied with a glance at the airlock. "We will seize the propulsion control keys and prepare the craft for a thorough inspection."

"No, _Second Claw Vasares_ Valenteus, you will do none of that", Bau replied scathingly. "I would very much like to speak with your superior officer who ordered my flight grounded, and seems to think he has the authority to inspect a special Citadel Alliance vehicle without very, very good cause."

"For that I will still require your verified ID."

"Well then…" The salarian made a gesture at her, "I transmitted my code 10 seconds ago, and received the handshake. What is the hold up on your end?"

"One moment." She killed the speakers and activated her com with gestures on the side of her helmet: "Cinquad-5-4, what's the status on the Spectre ID?"

"Uh, stand-by on tha-" the controlled cut off, and shouted something into his boom mike loud enough to make Valenteus flinch before the VI clamped down on the sound in response: "Yes Sir, I am verifying it again, but it's coming up clean! It's a smooth handshake all the way up to CITSPECCOM and back down. No, no Sir, there are no signs of tampering I can detect. So- yes, I will reboot and verify the connection." She heard a hand close over the boom mike as the operator covered it, leaving Valenteus to hear the sound of the CIC, and somebody shouting in the background.

She identified Ventaris in the mess of sounds, shouting something.

"Well?" She looked back at Spectre Bau.

"Uh, we are verifying", she answered the salarian.

"Verifying," he repeated, nodded sharply and looked down on the floor, thinking. "You really need your time verifying things here. Take me aboard your corvette and let me speak to the superior officer in charge."

"I can't do that. Not until I have confirmed your identity."

"Yes you will. On Spectre authority. Vasares Valenteus, _will you follow_ orders by a superior officer?!", he snapped.

"Yes Sir!" she responded before she could stop herself.

"Good. _Then get me your superior officer on Vidcom._ " His dark eyes could have burned a hole through fortress armor.

"Yes Sir. This way please." In the back of her mind, voices were screaming for dominance in the Amphitheater of the mind's congress. _Unverified person! Security risks! Implanted bombs!_ But she knew this was already way over her paygrade.

And if it came down to nasty things… well, she wouldn't be responsible for such a massive decision. And a part of her was very thankful for that.

* * *

"Jesus Christ these guys are tense. Tap 'em with a stick and they'd shatter", Batou remarked, finger wishing through the depths of the security camera trigraph.

"I can't exactly blame them. Spectre handling goes over an enlisted meritocracy. Officers exist for a reason," Garrus remarked, but a claw was massaging his scalp in a gesture every transhuman could recognize as a mixture of distress and shame.

"Not saying that", Batou turned around from the tactical Holotank. "But, I kinda want to know what Spectre Bau is planning to do with the CO."

"He made a couple of very encrypted calls", Athena's humanoid Avatar remarked from the Holotank. Like her namesake, the AI had chosen a greek woman in bronze armor, hammered over a modern powered undersuit, as the foundation of her avatar. Dark blue-hued eyes looked at some of the assembled people. "IP addresses point at Palaven and the Citadel."

Everyone exchanged glances, then looked at Garrus, whose fringe had started to make a subtle sound. The expression on his face was almost universal: "Ouch."

Togusa looked at Athena: "And the camera feeds are still streaming to that other address?"

"Yes, I am still streaming all the feeds Spectre Bau requested," the AI confirmed, and smiled smugly. "Despite attempts to the contrary."

* * *

"What do you mean, the vehicle is streaming data?", Talon Commander Ventaris thundered across the CIC of TCV _Ventelantes Aktura._

"There's a high-priority Data stream with CITMIL Flags on the slipbeam cue from Specte-616. I have no authority to override that", the operator replied flatly from his console.

"What do you mean you have no authority? It's a suspect vehicle!"

"Still doesn't go that far up", the operator remarked frustrated and turned around in his seat. "Sir, I am telling you, I can't override it, and that means I _cannot_ override it. Point, end of discussion. Unless you want to shut down the local comm buoy network, I can't stop that transmission. And that requires-"

"Use cyberwarfare then. Cut off the specific connection."

"I tried that", the operator replied with an edge of forced patience. "It doesn't work. And now-" he turned back at his console. "And now the AI just called me stupid", he remarked resigned. "I'm sorry Sir, but that stream is staying up. Nothing I tried sticks. It's shutdown or bust."

Without another word, Ventaris turned around with a disgusted look on his face. "Keep trying."

"Doing my sirefucking best", the specialist remarked under his breath and exchanged glances with his neighbours.

"And can somebody finally tell me how they keep forging the ID?" Ventaris asked aloud.

"Yes", another Signal Specialist remarked and stood up from his position. "They _aren't,_ Sir. We cross-verified everything a dozen times now. Unless the transhumans somehow subverted every single comm buoy, including the priority system defense sliplinks, they are not in control of that handshake. It's confirmed. That is Spectre Bau on the… SSV Fuji Nagato." He shortened the unfamiliar name.

The tactical holotank on the command dais made a chiming sound of an incoming priority call connection. Ventaris ignored it.

"And that would be my turn to chime in", a voice remarked acidely. Now Ventaris wheeled around, and stormed towards the tank, there the head and shoulders of a salarian hovered. The wireframe box around him was flanked by small information tags: the connection came from one of the TCV _Ventelantes Aktura_ parasite vehicles, the dispatched gunboat to be precise, and had been made with Spectre authority.

"Talon Commander Aldrien Ventaris, I am very disappointed in your conduct", Jordam Bau spoke in Kesheon. Every turian on the bridge jolted together, fringes contracting. A very few exchanged discrete fistbumps. "Your dedication to the security of the Citadel Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy is absolutely commendable - as long as it isn't misguided. Demanding a secondary verification of my ID would have been understandable. Grounding my spacecraft for a day or more for inspection purposes is not."

"Against transhumans, you can never be too careful", Ventaris replied smoothly.

"If you wish to enforce security and identification policy, you should listen to your technical experts. Spectre QAIs are neuro-locked. The ID chain literally cannot complete without me being who I am."

"That's-"

"-the accredited claim of an entire joint species Task Force investing 250 billion credits into developing the latest iteration of the implant. I am not the first Spectre operating on transhuman space. The implant _is_ secure. As for you, Commander Ventaris, there will be consequences. I understand the bad blood between your civilizations - that you mistrust the transhumans by cultural indoctrination. But I never thought it would become as bad as your case.

"You will clear the SSV _Fujibayashi Nagato_ for continued flight at this time. And your conduct will be further examined. Expect your boarding team back aboard shortly. And Commander? Be thankful I _only_ called the High Triarch of the Starfleet. Greet Victus from me when he calls you, I hope his daughters are well. Spectre Bau, _out._ "

The trigraph vanished without any fanfare.

There was total silence. Silent glances and text chats were exchanged.

Then the Comms officer spoke up: "Sir? ...I have Triarch Victus from Starfleet High Command on the line. Where do you want to take it?"

The crew watched as slowly and stiffly, Commander Vectaris walked off the bridge, and towards his Ready Room.

After years, he had finally taken things a step too far.

* * *

Almost the entire JTF team, and more than a few off-shift crew, where waiting at the airlock leading into the pressure vessel proper when Bau returned, shouting and hooting with raised arms and applause. A few entographs had also been spawned on the walls and ceiling, a mixture of party, anti-authority and anti-turian memes. The old 2199 A.D. "Bird with a stick" meme was plastered across the right wall, but modified with a graffiti vector render of Bau, stomping on the grey terran bird with an oversized white, mechanical foot. The stick that usualy entered through the rectorm and just existed through the beak was now clearly broken and shooting from both ends, and the entire image was surrounded by a "Spectre Bau Inc - Your turian stick-up-ass remover" wrap in bright green, making it look like some strange company insignia.

"Good one!", somebody shouted from the mass of voices, and friendly slaps rained down on Bau's shoulder and back. The salarian took it steadfast, and made eye contact with Captain Akio, who stood in the back, dignified as always. "Captain, get the Nagato ready for underway, if you'd please. New flight plan is hard burn all the way."

"Flank profile all the way to Kasint, aye aye," she confirmed with a small smile. "We will be underway in 15 minutes." The ARvatar vanished in a small animation, reducing itself from color to blue, from volumetric to an artistic wireframe, and then was gone completely. Bau nodded, and turned around. "Now, Gentlesophs… if you'd please clean this up", he waved at the walls. "And have a good evening."

With a smile, and the JTF in tow, he walked back into the innards of the spacecraft. Batou caught up with him: "Spectre Bau, Sir, MT Alpha-01 will be starting our evening sparring session in about 45 minutes to an hour. Your team is invited to join us."

Bau considered the words for a moment: "I'd be honoured to join you, and will forward the invitation." He eyed the massive frame of Batou's cybernetic sleeve, then gave the chest a playful, but high-powered punch from his prosthetics.

"Is that a challenge, Sir?" Batou asked with a smile.

Bau smiled right back, and showed his teeth, transhuman-style. "It is."

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** Welcome to turian space! Enjoy your stay and brace for all sorts of receptions! Writing the turians was suprisingly tough - as a meritocratic society, their bias and prejudice take a very different form than you'd nessecarily and intuitively expect from humans. It also means the people in command positions tend to be decisively un-stupid. Which can cause funky internal conflicts when they get caught in a complex situation with less data. Talk about "does not compute", eh?

Next up is some ring time, and more bonding, until our team arrives at its first destination in transhuman space... the frontier administration world of Kasint.


	50. Author's Note

Nick Here.

Thanks for your support all this time. Both me and Sevoris appreciate it.

However because one of us have problems back home, and the other wont move until things get cleared, I have decided to put this story on hold. For a while. It would be continued ASAP after one of us could deliver to you this story without outside problems.

Best Regards,

Nick Bana

"REFORMASI"


	51. Borders Pt 3

"What do you mean, he made him punch himself in the face? I thought that was the Major's big move!" Kat looked bug-eyed at the unseen replay of Batou punching himself in the face just underneath a lifted salarian leg.

"Not anymore it seems", Togusa remarked with a smile. "Though I've never seen the Major hardjack people in a leg lock before. She either breaches you wirelessly or does something with her hands."

"I guess that's why they made him a Spectre and not her", Mirai said loudly.

Kat rolled her eyes: "It's not that simple!"

"So how does it work?", Mirai shouted back mollified.

"Kids!" Saori put a hand on each one's shoulder. "Not now. We only have half an hour, so let's not squander that."

"But how does it work?"

"Basically? Spectres are really powerful. A few hours ago, Bau got us through a turian border check in 20 minutes flat. And he called somebody in turian High Command to make it happen."

"Like, in the movies? 'Get me the Prime Minister?` Oh wow, that's so cool!" Mirai was bouncing on the couch.

Togusa smiled. "Basically. Spectre authority is a very powerful tool, but it also means not everyone gets it. And transhumanity simply hasn't been trusted with that yet."

"Why is it we always have to prove we aren't a danger? It's unfair! I'm not hurting a soul but I'm a supposed possible menace, and Kharlir is trusted even though he's an idiot!"

Togusa sighed silently. [She had a bad encounter today?], he comm'ed Saori on a private channel.

[A few kids tried to bully her, yes. But I handled it.]

[How, my dear?]

[A turian parent wouldn't have it. We talked. Actually a pretty nice guy, believes in personal action first.]

With a mental nod, Togusa returned his attention to his little kid. "Mirai, people always have problems with that which they don't know."

"Yeah, but…"

He raised a hand. "We are both different, and alien, and we're new. It's been 35 years since First Contact. You are part of the second generation of transhumans who grow up on the Citadel. You're very new. The kids in your school… they don't come into contact with a lot of transhumans, just through our differing population sizes and cultural inertia. But, If they're afraid because we're "better"… well, let's be better than them. Let's not be spiteful and full of anger and rejection. Go open through life, and as you act friendly to your environment… so will the environment act friendly to you."

"Like you do now, working with a Spectre to show them we can be trusted?"

"Exactly like that." He nodded enthusiastically.

"Alright Daddy, I can do that!"

"Great!" He smiled at her brightly. "Sa, has there been…"

"No, not since we last had a chance to talk. Togusa, is everything alright?"

"I…" he cleared his throat. "You know this, but now it applies double-plus - this can't get outside of this call. Understood?" He glanced at the security read-outs, checking the encryption status. With his mental hand, he nudged the encryption level all the way up, waiting while the QEC backbone synched a new set of cryptographic keys between the _Nagato_ and the SA servers on the Citadel.

They all nodded. "That goes for you especially, Mirai. I expect Tili to watch your tongue vigilantly."

"Yes Dad."

The ARvatar of her muse appeared on her shoulder. "I will pay attention, Mr. Togusa."

"Good." Togusa took a deep breath, and felt the "click" in the back of his mind that indicated neurotransmitter releases, leading the bubble of emotions beneath his surface.

"Saori, Kat, Mirai… I'm scared. They're still picking the code appart, but I've been with Section 9 long enough to know sophisticated work when I see it. This… this is _too_ good for a plucky terrorist group."

"Dad… are you saying this might be-"

"I can't", he cut her off with a gesture. "But… there is a possibility."

"My… Dad." Kat looked _scared_. "That would mean… war, right? Like, a real war."

"If, _if_ the politicians choose to go down that path…"

"Dad, it's not politicians who will decide this. If nothing else, we will have terrorist attacks. With _starships._ It's happened before. Remember what happened during the Outer Fringe War?"

"Kat…"

"If what you say is true… you realize you can't let them start a war, right? You know how this ends? They're running the documentaries on the Networks from time to time. Projections of possible wars, and they all agree it would be an absolute bloodbath. Dozens, hundreds of billions of people would die." Kat's voice began to break. " _We_ would likely not have a chance to be reinstated for… ever?"

"Yeah Kat, I know. And that is why I am scared. I want you to be safe."

Saori spoke up: "And we will be, Christian, trust me on that. And we're with you every step of the way to ensuring that that war never happens."

Togusa listed to that silently, absorbing the confidence she radiated.

"...Thank you."

"That's what family is for, Christian. That's what we are for."

"Group hug?" Kat asked and stood up.

"Group hug", they all agreed.

The augmented reality space made it all so real. There was not just visuals and sound, but touch and warmth, a real sense of plasticity of the skin. He felt their warm breaths and knew they felt his, and even through he couldn't really lean on them, the illusions created by his neural implants made it more than enough physical support for this Ghosts liking.

And for that one moment, Togusa embraced the augmentality as his world, threw away the distance and the knowledge it was "just" telepresence, and just took in, and gave out, the love and support of his children and his wife.

"No matter what happens..." she said in the confines of their group embrace.

"We will always be there for each other", he promised.

* * *

Garrus was emerging from the attached bathroom of his private cabin when the wall terminal went off with an incoming call.

The turian's left hand twitched a pattern, and his omnitool opened the clock and communication widgets on his ARO implants. He'd synched several galactic times to his system: The Standard Citadel Time, the transhuman Standard Military Time that also was the ship time of the _Nagato_ , and Palaven Global Time +5.

The later was now at 19:42. Evening time on the shores of Preantis.

 _Finally._

Garrus grabbed a quick tunic off his bed and clipped it over his shirt while he checked the screen. He noticed the rotating sigil on the screen and looked up, knowing _something_ was listening and responsible for it: "You are routing this via turian priority networks?"

The disembodied voice of a female AI with a turian flange answered him: "There are several credentials linked with your profile. In turian space, invoking transmission privileges as a senior turian reservist is convenient for transmission resources."

"...Good thinking. Connect me please."

"Right away. Initiating Privacy mode." Garus noticed a tonal shift in a small ring-like entoptic element that had appeared on his communication window. It turned from green to a deep purple, and then faded out of his augmented view as the channel was closed.

Before him, the flatness of the holographic screen shrunk away into the distance to outline shapes, filling with color. The other end of the connection was a wide open living room, the broad windows of armaglass looking out over the evening-lit sea beyond.

A set of large couches and _relytrea_ had been arranged in front of the camera, and Garrus knew he was looking out from the living room screen mounted over the traditional fireplace, though judging by the lack of flickering light on the thick carpets, it wasn't lit at the moment.

A single young turian was sitting in front of him. She looked to be in her late turian teens, shoulders broad and arms and legs lengthened by regular exertion. A series of small black nodules dotted her head, and her eyes had a strange luminous quality to it. The surface identifiers of cybernetic implants, of earned metal.

Her facepaint was nigh-identical to his - the two-segmented streaks on the nose, the lines under the eyes, the streaks across the mandibles. The only variation where two dots and thin lines above her eyes, further framing them with accents of grey.

The clothing was relaxed - a shirt and tight running trousers, accented with a tunic - but the rank insignia braces were proudly pinned to the shoulders, sleeves and breast. The two-bladed dagger, laser beam and four sharp-edged wings of the Palaven 23rd Legion, and the flaming six wings around the Deutan Tristeles of its 2nd Aerospace Assault Corps.

Garrus flared his mandibles in a smile: "Hey Sis."

"Hey Garrus, big brother", Solana Vakarian greated him back. Her face was passive. "What took you so long?"

"Spectre Operative, will travel", he jested. She laughed, but it was strained. Garrus pulled his mandibles and spurs in. "Everything alright? Where's the rest of the family?"

"They'll be with us later. Garrus… Grandma just had a stroke."

"WHEN?" He jumped off his chair, sending it spinning towards the bed. He stopped himself before his claws rammed into the holographic screen.

"5 minutes ago. The EMTs just rushed her off to the hospital." He heard the tears bubbling under the surface.

"Do they know what it is yet? Is it Corpalis Syndrome..."

Solana shook her head. "Aneurysm of some kind. They didn't want to say more. But, it's probably something augmentation-related, for her new neurogenotronics."

"Teylatron guide and protect."

"...I'm sorry Garrus."

"It's… it's okay, Solana. You dealing?"

"Not… not really. I feel like shit, but you've been off the grid all day and when you messaged me you'd have an hour while your spacecraft discharged, I got the family together. And then… then out of nowhere, while I was dressing, Grandma just falls over in the living room." She glanced over her shoulder, and Garrus leaned to the right, shifting his perspective to look past her.

There was a freshly cleaned spot on the carpeted floor, the fibres still wet with recent cleaning foam use.

"And you, Garrus?"

"...Okay, I guess?" He dropped back into his helpfully returning seat, and exhaled, biting back his own fears. _Keep talking. Don't let the stress reaction set in._

A nonverbal message appeared on his ARO:

[Asiri (Local AI)]: You are showing signs of stress. Is everything alright?

[You]: ...No, but I do not require aid from your side.

[Asiri]: Acknowledged.

"Garrus?"

"Sorry, something on this end. And I've… been hard at work."

"Police work, or…?"

"Police work. Okay, and the raid on that transhuman Adriens."

"I've been following that one. It's been branded a case of corporate warfare. Rumors are Adriens stonewalled all further police investigations. That true, or did you doctor around?"

Garrus shrugged. "Not as far as I know. Not exactly surprised though. From what Togusa told me on the wayside-"

"The transhuman ex-detective?"

"Yeah, pretty nice guy. From what he told me, and I saw myself? Bekenstein's a massive collection of scumbags, and Adriens even more so. This transhuman, he had his augmented hands everywhere. Currency laundering, forged IDs, DIP cracking and Idip smuggling, military tech, the whole list of white and grey collar crime. No wonder he doesn't want the police sniffing around. Oh, and he smuggled Egos."

"Wait, he did _what_?" Solana looked aghast.

"Yeah, I learned that during the debriefing. That asshole somehow obtained copies of military minds, and then had them lobotomized and sold to customers in the Terminus. With runtime abo model and all."

"Spirit. I don't want to think about that…" Her gaze drifted off into the distance, and Garrus realized what he had just raised attention too. _Oh shit._

"But besides the mansion… I actually was part of a few actual transhuman interrogations."

"Wait, you got to see an actual transhuman interrogation? What's it like? Do they like, take him apart like they show it in the vids?" She made grimace and tried to turn her voice into an imitation of a human one: "We don't have the time, just decompile him."

"No, Sis, far less dramatic in some ways." Garrus permitted himself a laugh. "The biggest difference was that we only had his stack, so it was a virtual interrogation. Or, "Simulspace" as they call it, considering our dear terrorist only exists as disembodied information at the time."

"Wait, how did you participate? Did you get yourself a DNI?"

"Just an old-fashioned Neural Transducer helmet. Though granted, it was one of those nifty new models that uses those bioprotein complex gizmos to work… anyway, they even have an interrogation room and all. And then it was basically like when they asked our turian captive - They asked him stuff, and scanned his neural activity at the same time, and used that to determine what he knew."

"Sounds so normal!"

"Is my little sis disappointed?"

"...Not really, thinking about it. Because if it was true… that would honestly be more horrifying. Just… ripping a copy of a mind apart to find information."

"Even under special circumstances?"

"I don't know Garrus. You are probably better qualified to consider that than your young Aerospace Mechanized Shock Infantry sister."

"You think?" She nodded, then had a hitch in her breath.

"...It's so good to talk to you now, brother."

"And to you. I… I wish I was there, right now. With you."

"...When are you going to be on the Net again?"

Garrus looked up. "You heard that?"

The female turian voice answered: " _No. What do you wish to know_?"

"The transit time to Kisaleves, STL Flight."

"19 hours, estimate."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome. Re-entering privacy mode."

He turned back to the image of his sister in the living room. She had leaned towards the screen: "Was that an AI?"

"Yes. The local one for my room, anyway. Or maybe the one the transhumans assigned to support me. I don't know, to be honest."

"What's it like, anyway? Being surrounded by all these AI…"

"You don't really notice it. Lights dim the same way, doors open and close as usual. If I had to be more precise, there's more… edge intelligence?"

"Edge intelligence?"

"It all reacts a little smoother, a little bit more predetermined. A bit more intelligent. And well… okay, you start to notice it during things like the interrogation. They have these humanoid robots… bioroids… no idea what they are under that outer shell, but they have restraint tentacle limbs and all, for controlling prisoners. Those are tack-smart."

"And I've worked with a couple analysis AIs now. Those are very good as well."

"How's their personality?"

"It's there, but… like, you know you are speaking with an intelligent being, but they are LAIs. Not AGIs."

"But there are some, right? Like, you are on a cruiser or something? I'm pretty sure those have at least a few AGI and one ASI."

"Yeah. There's Athena, and I know some of the crew are AGI. Our pilot during the operation was one too, I'm pretty sure."

"How is this… Athena?"

"...Approachable? So far all our interactions have been friendly, if… professional. She doesn't seem to be like some-" he stopped for a moment. "Some… AI who just chats with you casually."

Solana snorted amused. "Figures." She looked at her feet and back at him.

Garrus mulled over a response, arriving at a low: "Yeah".

They sat there, silently. Garrus glanced at the small clock ticking at the edge of the screen, showing how long the _Nagato_ would remain slip-linked to the Extranet.

"...Spirits know I'm just… I don't know. We didn't have time to talk, so I wanted to talk too, but Grandma obviously also gets to you… I'm sorry Garrus."

"Solana?" She looked up. " _Don't be._ We both know the drills. We're keeping each other healthy right now. Now, let's talk until our time runs out, and if you learn anything or the rest of the family comes on, we'll talk about that. And then, once you know what is up with Grandma, contact me. I'll answer as soon as I can. Okay?"

"Right." She snapped up at his tone of voice, all First Claw Vasart.

They talked the entire rest of the time, and through the entire undocking routine. Unseen and ignored, groups of orange-painted service robots on the _Nagato's_ hull detached the thick superconductor cables that had been used to discharge her static storage sinks and pushed them off towards the distant spire of the turian military discharge station, orbiting the nadir of a super-jovian gas giant, and the _Nagato_ pushed off on white puffs of methane-oxygen RCS thrusters.

Only the beep that announced only 30 seconds remained before the Slipbeam telescopes shut down and cut them off from the civilian extranet ripped the two from their talk.

"Garrus… I love you. Whatever comes, whatever happens, whatever it will take… I love you. We love you."

"And so do I, Solana." Garrus breathed out. "So do I. Take care, and until I come back online… the best to Grandma."

[10 seconds.]

"Have a nice evening on Palaven."

"And a good flight to you." A turian claw reached out, and disconnected the call.

A moment later, the message popped up at the edge of the screen: [Civilian Extranet Access now Offline. Re-establishment in Buffer Access Mode in T-Minus 2 hours LVT.]

Garrus breathed out, and listened to the distant thrumm of the starships systems.

Then he turned away from the monitor, toggled off his personal devices, dropped on the bed and started crying.

* * *

 **A/N(Sevoris):** The scene with Garrus and Solana channels indeed some of the things I've gone through over the past weeks, though the exact diseases and event types obviously don't match. The dialog needed some work and more live to it, in the end I landed at this.

It was also carthatic, to externalize some of the feelings of the last weeks.

Besides that... there will be changes in pacing, mostly, as well as style. This story has been hovering in a bit of a long limbo between major milestone scenes, so going forward that is getting compressed. The landing on Kisaleves, the next big location, should be no more than two parts away, in Part 5 of "Borders".

 **A/N(Nick):** Will delete AN chapter after a few days.


End file.
